Would you like some malware with those strawberries and cream?
Surfing for Wimbledon might serve-up more than you bargained for.
This week, coinciding with the opening of this year’s prestigious Wimbledon tournament, experts at SophosLabs have discovered that webpages on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) website have been infected with malicious code.
Pages on the ATP website are just some of thousands on the internet to have been injected with a malicious script that triggers a process which infects the victim's computer with spyware.
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Web security experts at Sophos note that by infecting pages on the website, the hackers are likely to capitalise on excitement surrounding Wimbledon 2008, one of the four grand slams in the tennis calendar making up part of the ATP tour, as tennis fans will be likely to visit the website keen to find out the latest news.
Cybercriminals seeking to infect unsuspecting web surfers are increasingly turning their efforts to surreptitiously infecting popular websites, such as the Miami Dolphins' site which was hacked last year a week before the team was due to host the Super Bowl. As an indication of the size of the problem; 79 percent of the 15,000 newly infected webpages that Sophos identifies each day are found on legitimate websites that have been hacked.
"The hackers responsible for this attack don't care what sites they infect, so long as there is a stream of potential victims likely to surf across the net, straight into their trap. The ATP website is just one of many sites to have been exploited by hackers trying to steal information from innocent internet users," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos. "With the Wimbledon tournament taking place at the moment, the ATP website will be receiving a spike in visitors - but any tennis fan visiting the infected pages on the site risks being served straight into a crook's criminal racket."
Advice and updates supplied by Sophos. For more information visit www.sophos.com
