3 tips to safely enjoy a summer of sports
Large events traditionally cause a significant surge in cybercrime, driven by phishing and social engineering. Make sure your company’s employees are aware of the dangers and prevent sensitive company information from being leaked.
If you’re looking forward to a blissful summer of sports, you’re not alone. Alongside the yearly Tour de France, there are the European Football Championships in Germany and the Olympic Games in Paris. Big events always create a big spike in cyber risks, but when the world’s biggest competitions coincide in one summer, it’s all about being vigilant.
Record-breaking summer guaranteed
For the Olympics alone, the organizing committee expects 9.7 million spectators on site – all holding tickets for which they registered digitally with their payment information. An additional one billion paying viewers will be added via streaming services. To illustrate, during the 2021 Tokyo Games (in the pre-generative AI era), the organization had to fend off as many as 450 million cyberattacks. The actual numbers for 2024 will make you dizzy.
But it is not only the events themselves that catch the eye of cybercriminals, nor users sitting at home on the couch watching them. People who show no interest in these sporting events will also targeted with all kinds of scams where criminals send out fake newsletters, with fake news to lure them to a malicious website. Or scammers set up fake online stores where you can order all kinds of non-existent gadgets to gift to sports enthusiasts among your friends and family.
Why should this matter to your business?
It is dangerous for any manager to place the responsibility of carelessness solely on the end user, since every consequence could well be for your organization. What if one of your employees completes a fake ticket purchase through the corporate network, or opens rogue livestreams at work? Then the security of your corporate data is compromised. The internet connection alone could provide a direct backdoor for hackers, and the personal information they gather through a transaction could be used to crack passwords or to get a better idea of your business layout before striking.
It could even be worse: a lot of personal information is given when purchasing tickets, for example, which can lead to identity fraud. Scammers, using that obtained info, can pose as employees of your company. This obviously raises all sorts of security concerns and can even lead to reputational damage if it turns out that a hacker posed as an employee of your company and to gain a foot in the door with your customers. The recent incident at Ticketmaster (500 million customer records were stolen) once again points out that it’s not exclusively rogue websites that toss your data onto the street.
3 tips to safeguard your company and your employees
1. Set up your defenses correctly (or find help)
Everything starts with good preparation. This applies to the athletes who will give their lives for a good result this summer, but it also applies to the security of your company. Make sure that all technical matters are in order and that you have an overview of everything that happens from a technical perspective within the organization. If this is a feat too big for the internal IT team, make sure that they are properly assisted. By an external partner, or by the right security solutions. For example, check out the capabilities of the Secutec SecureSIGHT managed cyber intelligence solutions for identifying (and preventing) potential problems.
2. Check outbound data streams
You don’t always have control over what your employees use your network for. What you do have control over is which data streams succeed in exciting your company network. Secutec SecureDNS is a reliable security solution that prevents your corporate network from connecting to malicious domains. It adds a necessary layer of security to your current antivirus and firewall solutions, protecting your organization from malware, phishing and other types of cyberattacks.
Our solution automatically forwards your organization’s DNS requests to the Secutec SecureDNS server for immediate review in our cyber threat intelligence database. If a user attempts to connect to a malicious domain, the connection is blocked. If the domain is secure, the connection is allowed. The entire process happens without delay or inconvenience to the user. In this way, you greatly reduce the chances of employees accidentally connecting to malicious domains that can steal data or initiate a dangerous action.
3. Provide information and training
An element not to be underestimated remains educating employees. Studies show that classic cybersecurity training is grossly inadequate if it is given only annually, for example. People need regular refresher training. Seize the upcoming sports summer as an excellent excuse to repeat the basics once again. Consider:
- The importance of password hygiene and 2FA tools
- The potential danger of the ‘unsubscribe’ button (this is how you let scammers know that your account is active, in some cases even asking for your login credentials before you can ‘unsubscribe’)
- Phishing training
- The reflex to always manually navigate to a login portal to sign in. Just as you should always go to the official web shops yourself to make purchases. This is the only way to avoid fake landing pages
Part of the solution: organize group activities (so you can be in control)
Avoid having your employees using livestreams through rogue websites. Of course, sometimes business can be mixed with pleasure, so you can use these events occasionally to improve group coherence. For example, organize watch parties to follow national team games. That way you avoid employees using livestreams from rogue sources on their own (perhaps even on the sly).
“Every disadvantage has its advantage” a great football player once said, and that also applies in the case of a summer of sports. It is important to be and remain vigilant, but certainly don’t let that spoil the fun. Take our tips to heart, get your cybersecurity in place and enjoy a worry-free summer!