For IBM, cybercriminals today operate like a business, looking for ways to take advantage of popular trends and events that draw victims to the internet. Types of hacking attacks can be, for example, an email offering services or promotions related to the Games or fake mobile apps offering “free streaming via streaming” of the Olympic events.
According to the report “IBM X-Force Special Report: 2016 Brazilian Threat Landscape”, while cybercriminals are often lurking around to steal personal data, the most popular tactic used by hackers in Brazil is to gain direct access to banking and payment information. Criminals will seek to exploit the vast amounts of financial transactions surrounding the Olympic Games – from bank card transactions at ATMs to payments made in high street and/or e-commerce – to steal vast amounts of credentials and card data from all possible ways.
Some of the main scams that IBM researchers predict could be practiced during the Olympics include:
- Mobile points of sale: Mobile devices, which can be easily compromised through malware, are now being used as a common selling point – in Brazil and worldwide. They will be another breach channel for criminals, who can use malware-infected devices to extract data from credit cards.
- Phishing olympic-themed mobile/malware apps: Users should also be wary of the potential novelty of fake mobile apps, which are said to offer services related to the Olympics. Once downloaded, these apps will send aggressive advertisements, redirecting the user to phishing, or they can override official websites with fake screens to install malware on the mobile device and steal their victims' credentials and personal data.
To better understand the threats surrounding the Olympic Games, it is also important to understand the local threat landscape in Brazil, which is the second largest country in terms of internet banking fraud and financial malware attacks in the world.
Examining threat data, IBM identified the following trends:
- Brazilian malware: high volume, low sophistication. Taking into account the lower consumer awareness of the threats, criminals who operate with malware take advantage of points with low protection to carry out very successful infections in Brazil. In that sense, the older types of cybercrime are easy to execute and are likely to continue and increase during the Olympics. O "Window", for example, is a Brazilian malware class that ranks in bedroom place on the global list of most prevalent malware families. Window includes all kinds of malicious code that overlays fake windows over real website pages and represents 44% of malware attacks in Brazil.
- Internally created threats: While cyber threats around the Games can target both Brazilians and foreigners, cybercrime tends to impact local people rather than tourists in order to gain access to cash that can be used locally. This eliminates the need to articulate an international cybercriminal operation, such as illegally transporting money, transferring/exchanging currency and involving other collaborators in the crime.
- Cross-border collaboration: lesser cybercriminals in Brazil are collaborating with more sophisticated dark web criminals to set up advanced phishing or malware attacks. For example, criminals are buying tools like gateways of anonymous payments to gain direct access to cash, and IBM has also noticed that cybercriminals in Brazil add advanced code to their malware, provided by Russian cybercriminals.
In addition to consumers, local and global companies must be alert to cyber threats related to the Olympics.
- Be aware of new forms of threats as they emerge. Companies can, for example, join security intelligence-sharing communities such as IBM X-Force Exchange, in which information about the latest threats carried out in the world is shared.
- The malware code is constantly changing and new variants appear every week. Therefore, companies must use automatically adaptive security tools to protect against new threats as they arise.
- Retailers and merchants should implement testing procedures for their point of sale to identify erroneous configurations and other potential issues.
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