With India and Pakistan ready to battle it out on the cricket field in Mohali on Thursday, there has been a huge surge in traffic to cricket websites in India as fans go online for the latest results and match updates.
Sports sites reached their highest volume of traffic for the month during the week ending March 13, according to ComScore.
In fact, live streaming of the India-South Africa match on a popular sports site has broken India’s online streaming record, with over three million streams being delivered to 1.5 million consumers. The site generated a little more than 175 million page views between February 15 and March 23.
However, as the biggest match of the World Cup kicks off, cybercriminals are expected to capitalize on this event, warns a note Symantec. Symantec advises users to watch out for fake tickets as PDF attachments that can result in downloading malware on their systems. Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report XV revealed that the top web-based attacks involved applications that process PDF files, accounting for nearly half of the total attacks. This was a sizeable increase from just 11 per cent the previous year.
Websites that are set up for phishing attacks or to deliver malware may also increase. Symantec detected almost 4.4 million malicious web pages per month, according to the latest Attack Toolkits and Malicious Websites report. Cybercriminals can manipulate search results for their malicious websites to appear on top.
Some of these attacks may have been observed in different forms earlier, the World Cup 2011 provides a perfect occasion for cybercriminals to target cricket-crazy fans in India, added a note from Symantec.
