YouTube World Cup Videos Used to Promote Scams

[Starbuck]

One makes its way on the Daily Mail website

 

Security researchers warn that with all the FIFA World Cup fever going on, crybercrooks can use related YouTube videos to direct visitors to scam websites. One such video, promoting a fake Facebook account hacking tool ended up embedded in a Daily Mail article.

 

Even if you are not a soccer fan, you are likely to have heard that the world's most viewed sporting event, the FIFA World Cup is currently taking place in South Africa. The competition is already in the knock-out stages and the first two quarter finalists, Germany and Argentina, have been decided over the weekend.

 

England lost 4 - 1 to Germany on Sunday and was knocked out of the competition in a controversial match, where the referee failed to validate a perfectly good goal scored by Frank Lampard. In an online article covering the error, the Daily Mail embedded a YouTube video of the goal's replay from apparently a random YouTube source.

 

As the said video starts playing, an annotation pops up reading "Want to know how to hack Facebook accounts? Click Here." According to Sunbelt researcher Christopher Boyd, who looked into the incident, clicking on the link took users to another video hosted on the same YouTube channel.

 

This secondary video directed viewers to a blogspot site containing instructions on how to use an alleged Facebook account hacking tool, but downloading the program required users to take a survey. "Yes, it's one of those surveys where you sign up to nonsense in return for something that probably wasn't worth the time you put into it. More often than not, you'll find you've signed your life away to marketers and also downloaded an infection file," the researcher explains.

 

The secondary video linking to the scam has since been removed after being reported by numerous users to YouTube, but the incident stands as an example of how cybercriminals attract victims for their various scams.

 

 

Source:

YouTube World Cup Videos Used to Promote Scams - One makes its way on the Daily Mail website - Softpedia