FIFA World Cup 2022 is a Major Cybersecurity Risk

FIFA World Cup Is a Serious Cybersecurity Risk: It’s Time Businesses Upgrade Their Threat Model!

Cybersecurity leaders and experts have warned businesses that the FIFA World Cup 2022 is set to be the perfect breeding ground for cybercriminals and threat actors to unleash new-age cyberattacks.

Cybersecurity experts have warned businesses/brands of increased cyberattacks during the FIFA World Cup 2022. Yes! Threat actors and cybercriminals have been eyeing the biggest sports event on the face of this planet with the intention to unleash some of the most brutal and never-seen-before attacks on businesses and fans. In fact, Sports-ISAO aka the Sports Information Sharing and Analysis Organization has warned of imminent cyberattacks on the FIFA World Cup 2022.

This is not a new thing for the FIFA World Cup, as the 2018 World Cup reported a whopping 25 million cyber incidents. With new adversarial attack tactics combined with evolving geopolitical tensions, World Cup participants, sponsors, visitors, and affiliated organizations should be well-prepared for increased cyberattacks this year.

Now that the world cup has kicked off, it is time for businesses/brands as well as fans to up their guard against the nefarious cybercriminals.

FIFA World Cup 2022 and Cyberattacks: A Mismatch Made in Heaven

The rising use of digital technologies has become a part and parcel of everyday life. It’s highly likely that this will inflate the attack surface to unprecedented levels. Cybercriminals are likely to execute social engineering and phishing attacks in an attempt to steal financial and/or personal information.

What can businesses and brands do to keep cyber threats at bay during the FIFA World Cup 2022?

Since FIFA World Cup is undoubtedly one of the biggest sporting events in the world, businesses ought to be extra vigilant. Our cybersecurity experts recommend businesses to reassess their cybersecurity mechanisms and educate themselves about novel threat actors, and attack tactics. For instance, business leaders ought to train and educate their employees to keep an eye out for spear-phishing email campaigns that try to take undue advantage of the FIFA World Cup 2022.

Read also: Hackers Pose as Cybersecurity Firms in New Callback Phishing Attack

Futurism recommends the following cybersecurity measures to help brands/businesses up their security game during the FIFA World Cup 2022:

• Threat Intelligence: First and foremost, businesses ought to have a future-proof security plan in place. Ideally, this should include a comprehensive and advanced threat protection plan including a cybersecurity awareness program for all the employees within the organization.
  
  In addition, given the rise in sophisticated attack tactics and cyber espionage, businesses ought to invest in industry-leading intelligent threat protection solution (SIEM) that delivers actionable and intelligent threat insights to detect and/or identify threats before they turn brutal.




• Zero Trust: Next, many cybersecurity techniques fail to prioritize dark web threats combined with a lack of intelligent threat insights to help security and IT teams run incident response. These security experts often face fatigue from receiving thousands of often unwanted alerts every hour thus, many cyber incidents tend to go unnoticed or undetected for weeks and months.
  
  Futurism recommends having a Zero Trust Security Model in place to address such security challenges. A Zero Trust Security Framework helps to simplify risk management by eradicating implicit trust. Irrespective of the user’s location, situation, user, or the access method/platform, security takes center stage with a Zero Trust Security Model. Most importantly, it offers security admins and IT experts operational, strategic, and intelligent insights minus the noise to help them respond quickly to threats.




• Stolen Credentials: According to a report published by Digital Shadows, more than 22 billion credentials were breached this year. Hackers can obtain stolen credentials via numerous ways including malware deployment and social engineering to name a few. For instance, malware works by collecting information from web browsers or apps such as autocomplete data, saved credentials, and credit card data.
  
  In addition, it fetches information pertaining to the compromised device or machine such as OS information, process language, system hardware, and more. This is why businesses ought to have a robust identity and access management solution in place to ensure contextual and intelligent decisions about who should access what and how thus, ensuring intelligent and risk-based authentication.




• Ransomware Protection: Ransomware unarguably is the most prevalent cyber threat for businesses and given the massive number of cybercriminals executing this particular activity, the damage caused by Ransomware attacks is often lethal. Deploying robust and real-time monitoring tools can help businesses mitigate this cyber threat. The growing of Ransomware attacks is a stark reminder for businesses and brands to prioritize cyber security services. Getting help from a reliable cyber security services provider is one of the best ways to counter these types of cyber threats.

Read also: French hospital paralyzed by $10M Ransomware attack

Takeaway

Practicing basic cyber hygiene can go a long way when it comes to preventing cyber threats and risks for. However, seeking expert help from a managed security services provider puts a business in a better position to deal with a number of threats and attacks. As cybercriminals and threat actors become hyperactive during the FIFA World Cup 2022, we advise organizations to be extra vigilant.

In addition, as the FIFA World Cup 2022 fraternity and teams invest in advanced technologies and tools for achieving an upper hand, we at Futurism are dedicated to giving enterprises and brands that competitive edge by arming them with the right layers of security and cybersecurity resources and threat intelligence tools.

Disclaimer: All the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of their respective web authors and sources in no way reflect the views, objectives, or principles of Futurism Technologies.