ALKHOBAR, 27 June 2006 — Due to the length of the World Cup, there’s plenty of time for Internet resources to be leveraged to take advantage of the intense focus on this event. Over the past few weeks, spammers have been on the attack, trying to score with irritating and sometimes fraudulent e-mails. Anti-spam software provider, Commtouch, has identified tens of thousands of World Cup-related spam messages, with some containing what appear to be fraudulent offers.
World Cup spam has emerged in almost every language, and while some of it is actually related to the month-long football games taking place in Germany, most of it mentions the World Cup in order to sell typical spam offerings such as mortgages, online gambling and travel. Here are some examples of categories of spam and their related “World Cup” subject lines:
• Mortgage refinance — “World Cup extra cashback offer plus new quicker payments!”
• Gambling — “Free world cup prediction game: Your last chance to join!”
• Travel packages — “Win a VIP trip to the 2006 world cup final!”
• World Cup Viewing — “2006 FIFA World Cup now on mobile plus semi-final tickets to be won!”
“Spammers are trying to ride the World Cup’s wave of popularity. They are promoting travel, mortgages, betting schemes, and even a few things that are actually related to the football matches,” said Amir Lev, president and CTO of Commtouch. “These spammers send their unsolicited messages to millions of people in the hopes that even a tiny percentage will purchase their services, legitimate or not. The convergence of spam and malware — such as viruses and spyware — can make such attacks even more dangerous.”
It was long suspected that viruses and other assorted malware would hitch a ride on the interest generated by the World Cup so it’s no surprise that a worm is spreading via e-mail with subject lines including, “Naked World Cup game set” and “Soccer fans killed five teens.”
This worm, first detected on June 19, goes by various names, including Sixem.A. It attacks Windows machines with malware that modifies registries to disable antivirus software and steal information, and also downloads an e-mail engine for propagation to the infected device’s e-mail address list. Victims are encouraged to open an attachment to the e-mail, which looks like a graphic file but is, in actuality, the malicious code.
All security vendors are recommending that patching and antivirus updates are done at least daily during the World Cup to minimize the threat of attack. The reality of today’s computing environment is that threats spread faster than patches and signatures can be produced and implemented. The bottom line is that if the sender of an e-mail isn’t known or you weren’t expecting an attachment even from a known sender, don’t open the attachment!
Now, for a little World Cup fun. What if a company turned its analytics tools on the event to try to predict the winner? That’s exactly what the folks at Spotfire have done. With so much at stake, software provider Spotfire analyzed results for all team competitions dating back to 1985, and concluded that Brazil, France, Germany and Mexico would reach the semifinals. It’s already known that Mexico has been eliminated, but what about the others? The analysis of the event shows how analytics software can spot trends and relationships in a data set, but that in the end talent, circumstances and luck are also key factors in determining a winner.
Football fans can see the results for themselves, as well as interact with the data and make their own predictions, by visiting Spotfire OnDemand (http://www.spotfire.com/WorldCup) and trying Spotfire World Cup analytics. The service is free.
