Kim Addington
Chief Marketing Officer
nuBridges
Cybercrooks and spammers are having a field day during the Olympics. According to BBC News, the volume of junk email messages with an Olympic theme spiked prior to the opening ceremony. These messages try to trick people into visiting fake sites or opening booby-trapped attachments. The games these crooks and hackers play– phishing, spam, malware and data hijacking -- don’t have any rules.
News reports of the past week have spotlighted a number of instances where malicious cybercrooks are luring unsuspecting Internet users to click on compromised Web sites and handing over their personal information. There has even been a campaign that used emails crafted to look like they had been written by the International Olympic Committee. Think before you click!
Even with millions of dollars spent by Olympic games organizers on building a robust and secure IT infrastructure, athletes, fans, officials and foreign visitors can remain vulnerable to data loss and theft. Thousands of handheld devices and laptop computers are traveling with the athletes, fans, games officials and foreign visitors – subject to theft or loss. Any sensitive data stored without robust data protection software is fair game to these cybercrooks. There will always be hackers and spammers and they’ll always grasp opportunities like the Olympics to do their mischief, so it’s up to the individuals and businesses that transmit or store sensitive data to make absolutely certain that it’s protected. One winning way to guarantee that protection is through encryption of the sensitive data right at its source.
Do you have an example of Olympic-related data loss? We’d love to hear about it.
Talk soon,
Kim
