Bangkok--23 Jul--Core & Peak
If there was one major incident in June that truly had a global impact, it would be Michael Jackson’s passing last June 25. It was so large that it bogged down Google’s search engine when people from all over searching for news of his untimely death. Initially, this incident was interpreted by Google as a malware attack on its service, and why not? Cybercriminals are known to take advantage of these kinds of events for their social engineering schemes.
True enough, cybercriminals did not waste any time in exploiting such a historical event. Immediately after the news broke out, cybercriminals were quick to update their bots, spammed messages, and rogue antivirus software to use this event as their social engineering ploy and lure as many Internet users as possible into downloading their malicious pieces of code.
Another social engineering topic that cybercriminals continue to exploit is the continuous increase of H1N1 cases in all over the world. In June, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised the H1N1 global pandemic to level 6. Concerned users following the developments on this pandemic virus (particularly in Asia where the number of confirmed cases is increasing at an alarming rate) can easily fall prey to cyber attacks that use this topic in their social engineering techniques such as SEO poisoning of search results.
On targeted attacks, one significant phishing attack in the APAC region put Australian taxpayers at risk of having their personal details stolen by cybercriminals. On the other hand, Twitter users are still one of the most targeted victims of cybercrime today. With more than 19 million users around the world (and a growing population within Asia), malware like Koobface now started tweeting to infiltrate the growing Twitter population with their malware badness.
Thailand Media Contact:
Public Relations Consultant, Core & Peak Co.,Ltd.
Bussakorn Sonthikorn Tel +66 (0) 2439 4600 ext. 8202 e-mail [email protected]
Sriruput Siangyen Tel +66 (0) 24394600ext.8303 e-mail [email protected]