Cyber Attacks on Businesses During the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics

~~The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia are winding down and in a few days, athletes and spectators will be attending the closing ceremonies and hoping flights headed home. Many news outlets have warned since before the games started that individuals traveling to Sochi were at great risk for hacking to their computers, tablets, and mobile devices and that information privacy in Russia would be difficult to come by. But other news sources are also warning that businesses are also vulnerable to cyber criminals during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. And the bad news is that you don’t even have to travel outside of your country of origin to be targeted by hackers that are taking advantage of the excitement around the Winter Olympics. Many computer experts are warning businesses to be vigilant against attacks from the start of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony at the Fisht Olympic Stadium, to the closing ceremonies that will take place on Sunday February 23, 2014.
There will be a lot of interest in the games throughout the two and a half weeks they are held and that offers cyber criminals a perfect window of opportunity to target users with phishing attacks by masking emails designed to steal information. These emails are often disguised as updates on the games, sports commentary or other insights about the Winter Games. Hackers will then capitalize on this interest in the Winter Games by using those emails to inject malware, viruses and tracking software, sometimes right onto company servers. Other attacks on computer systems may not have criminal intent, but may be just as difficult to deal with. These would come in the form of cyber attacks from what’s now known as hacktivists. These are activists for social justice issues that use the internet, computers, and hacking to send a message about the social cause they are promoting, but hacktivists can also carry out acts of terrorism in their attempts to express their dissent. And just like the cyber criminals mentioned above, these hacker/activists are attracted to events that garner a lot of public attention because they believe they can get their message out to a wider audience.
At TRA Consulting, a busy IT solutions firm serving the Long Beach, Orange County and the Greater Los Angeles area, we can help you protect your business from phishing scams and other hacking activities by making sure your system is secure from top-to-bottom. We offer computing solutions for server and network security, set-up of email filters and firewalls that will help you and your employees save valuable time by ensuring that your important transactions and communications remain secure and private. One of the newer ways of securing email is to use Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance or DMARC which uses the Domain Name System or DNS to check the authenticity of your emails every step of the way. Contact TRA Consulting today and we can discuss security solutions and logistics for you and your business.