Luis Suárez World Cup ‘Petition’ Phishing Scam Making The Rounds

A clever phishing website is using the popularity of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, compromising users with a website that mimics FIFA’s official website.

Asking football fans to sign a petition in defense of Luis Suarez, a player from Uruguay now notorious for biting Italian national player Giorgio Chiellini.  The website adds each person, required to enter an email address, and could lead users to be added to a spam emailing list, suffer targeted attacks, or receive emails with malicious attachments.

The spoofed website closely matches the design of the official website, and any links redirect to FIFA’s official website, security researchers note.  The domain was created on June 27, 2014 and is tied to a person operating out of London.

Here is what Nadezhda Demidova, Kaspersky Lab Content Analyst, in a statement:

“Armed with users’ email addresses and telephone numbers, cybercriminals can conduct targeted attacks involving banking Trojans for computers and mobile devices.  This technique is used to get round two-factor authentication in online banking systems in cases where a one-time password is sent via SMS.”

Cybercriminals have found great success using social engineering tactics – simply tricking users into turning over their own personal information – and the problem persists.

Thank you to Kaspersky Lab providing us with this information

Image courtesy of Secure List