ID: IRCNE2012081572
Date: 2012-08-04
According to “ZDNet”, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London are well underway and so are the scams. 80 percent of Olympic Web domains are either only registered for the purpose of scamming or spamming visitors.
The new statistic comes from Zscaler, which looked at all identified domains containing the string "olympics" accessed by its customers over the course of a day. The security firm then classified them into three categories for further analysis: typo squatting, "TV on PC" scam, and "Made for Adsense" sites. Other scams include software for watching the Games that is actually spyware/adware, and survey scams.
Typo squatting, also called URL hijacking, is nothing new. The spam technique relies on you incorrectly typing in a website URL into your browser's address bar and thus landing on spammer's site instead.
The "TV on PC" scam type pushes receiving Cable/Satellite TV on a PC for a very low monthly fee. Many of fake Web pages are designed as reviews from users promoting the scam, or use simple HTTP redirection scripts.
The "Made for Adsense" (MfA) sites are highly targeted websites that drive web traffic from search engines by including enough content to get listed in results for a specific query. They contain lots of ads and encourage users click on them in order to get more interesting content.
The upside is that none of these sites appear to be serving up malware.
- 2