Ihotdesk, July 18 – In another example of classic opportunism, hackers have set up a malicious website based on the now infamous Zinedine Zidane head-butt.
Watched by a billion people on televisions around the world, Zidane’s inexplicable moment of madness has quickly become one of the most notorious incidents in the history of the sport.
Unsurprisingly then, cyber criminals have wasted no time in exploiting this intense interest, making a website distributing malicious code that installs a Trojan Horse on end-users’ machines.
According to Websense Security Labs, the Trojan Horse downloads further payload code from the site, using the underground "Web Attacker" toolkit.
Attacks are increasingly using current affairs and hot topics to dupe their victims and so it was almost inevitable that the Zidane episode would prompt such an attempt.
Already, several humorous emails based on the head-butt have been sent to email addresses around the world, but the vast majority of these offer harmless, if puerile, commentary on the incident.
But businesses are warned that hackers will always look to exploit issues dominating public attention and they are reminded to enlist IT support to protect themselves against such endeavours.
