Vuvuvzelas weren’t the only annoyance during this World Cup. Symantec’s July State of Spam and Phishing report reveals that the volume of messages with World Cup keywords in the subject line is more than nine times higher during this tournament compared to that in 2006. Not only this, but there’s also been a substantial increase in gaming sites and betting brands that have been ‘spoofed’ to capitalise on the popularity of the World Cup.
The top 10 subject lines matching news headlines recently are:
1. FIFA World Cup South Africa… bad news
2.World Cup: Uruguay Beats South Korea 2-1
3.Germany beats England 4-1 in World Cup
4.ONGOING FIFA WORLD CUP LOTTERY SOUTH AFRICA 2010.
5.World Cup: Germany Defeats England 4-1
6.SOUTH AFRICAN WORLD CUP 2010.
7.Oil spill teams keep wary eye on storm in Gulf
8.World Cup: Argentina Beats Mexico 3-1
9.Ghana beat US, reach first World Cup quarter-final
10.World leaders slam North Korea, Iran
The following trends are also all highlighted in the July 2010 report:
- Fraudulent gaming sites providing fake FIFA offers
- Symantec analysts found that health-related online pharmacy image spam to be the be particularly difficult to curtail and dubbed Spamonster since despite being blocked by Symantec, it continues to show up in filters.
- Symantec observed phishing websites spoofing Google’s social networking site Orkut. The phishing websites took advantage of the celebration of special occasions.
- The top subject line of the month was “Outlook Setup Notification.” Other top headlines include “Reset your Facebook password” and “Reset your Twitter password.”
