Spain, the country with the highest risk of suffering cyberattacks during football broadcasts from illegitimate sources

June 3 (Portaltic/EP) –

Spain is the country with the highest risk of suffering cyber attacks during the broadcasts of matches of the UEFA Champions League from illegitimate or unverified sources.

According to data from the cybersecurity firm Avast, a large part of soccer fans across Europe have already been targeted by cybercriminals on match days, especially at key moments of the match.

According to him Malware Analysis Lead of the company, David Jursa, the malicious agents “capitalize on human emotions and the desire of fans to see their team play in UEFA is a strong one”, so they use promises of free ‘streaming’ as lure with which they cybercriminals target them with pop-up ads that redirect to fake web pages.

In this sense, Avast remembers that users are often willing to give know your data to access the matches for free. Hence, ‘Inter Milan vs Manchester City free streaming’ or similar searches are quite common on the web.

However, he insists that those who opt for this route are aware of the obstacles they have to go through to reach those matches since, in general, the free streaming links do not appear on the first pages of the results, but rather in the end.

Most of the time, these links only lead to malicious content, without free video streaming. The usual path of this infection starts with a web page offering a fake download request of a program or ‘software’ necessary to watch the game.

This is by no means reliable, since in reality it is a ‘malware’ package that does not offer the desired content. Furthermore, on some occasions, cybercriminals may request information and personal data from users, such as email or phone number, with the promise of offering the game at no cost.

The researchers, however, have commented that users can access the content for free, but that cybercriminals deploy a series of traps to avoid it. To do this, they introduce layers of pop-ups that hide the video content, so that clicking to remove them opens up phishing and malvertising scams.

This means that clicking on these links can infect devices and cybercriminals. they would have free rein to steal the data of their victims or even carry out robberies ‘online’.

THE DANGEROUS KICK-OFF

Avast researchers observed spikes in blocked URL attacks during matches in the 2022-2023 UEFA Champions League season of top five soccer countries Europe: Spain, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Then, they noticed that there was a significant increase in the attacks on these blocked links on the days that there was a match and, especially, when the kick-off that started the game took place.

To establish a comparison between these countries, Avast has made a classification of markets, from safest to most dangerous, based on the increase in attacks on blocked URLs on match days, compared to non-match days.

In Spain, for example, these attacks grew by 154 percent on the days that the games were played, making it the country with the highest risk of suffering cyberattacks during the broadcasts of matches of the UEFA Champions League from unverified sources.

This country is followed by France (a 93 percent increase in attacks on soccer days), Italy (67 percent), the United Kingdom (39 percent) and Germany (35 percent).

The cybersecurity company recommends choosing authorized viewing methods -that is, official ones- to guarantee the safety of users during broadcasts, instead of doing so from unknown web pages.

It is also advisable to use security ‘software’ that can block the popup windows and dangerous sites before cybercriminals can cause serious and often irreversible damage.