Cup runneth under

As football fever peaks, beware the new e-perils.

Brace yourself for frenzied football hoopla, as the season reaches a zenith. Brace yourself, also, for dangers that lurk behind the most innocent looking of things floating about in cyberspace. Digital virus makers and phishing scamsters are having a field day, say security analysts.

Hackers have grown wise to the psychological vulnerabilities of potential targets. In fact, going by what Niraj Kaushik, country manager, India and SAARC, of security firm TrendMicro, has to say, hackers display market-tracking skills that could put many a marketer to shame. Hackers, he says, keep close track of news headlines, and also review attack success rates.

So if football gets you into a tizzy, watch out. "Until now," says Kaushik, "World Cup and cricket have by far overshadowed any other social networking events. The number of cyber attacks (both on mobile and computers) have seen an accelerated growth."

Websense, an Internet filtering and web security firm, points out that since June 2005, sports-related websites have seen growth of over 56 per cent "" up from nearly 3,29,800 to more than 5,15,780 today.

Most of these sites offer real-time game scores, player statistics and up-to-the-minute analysis "" but many of them also end up infecting computers with viruses, spyware, malware and spam receivers. Sports fans, goes the story, are not always careful about what they do online.

That's just the attitude they like, says Surendra Singh, head, South-east Asia and India, Websense. "We are already seeing the World Cup being used as a vehicle for online fraudsters to plant malicious code onto seemingly innocent websites," says Singh, "and they're increasingly sophisticated."

While most enterprises and households in India do have antivirus software and firewall protection, that's hardly enough as a defence against the most ingenious of frauds, some of them executed over email.

"The latest email scams play on the urgency of response to a topical event. This tactic is known as 'social engineering' and is a popular method used for financial gain through the exploitation of users' trust," observes Kaushik.

Old-style email scams abound too. Even as you read this, some naive net surfer somewhere might be gleefully responding to an email that claims to be offering platinum tickets to the World Cup final at a massive discount (going cheap now that Germany is out... you see).