World Cup websites attacked by Anonymous

Hactivism group Anyonymous has fulfilled the promise it made to hack into the websites of companies sponsoring the FIFA World Cup, as well as departments of the Brazilian government.

Protesting against the substantial funds invested in  the tournament, the organisation began its #OpHackingCup campaign on 11th June and kicked off by DDoSing one website and defacing a further eight.

The campaign is targeting such websites as Visa, Sony, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Budweiser and Adidas, all sponsors of the 2014 World Cup, as well as the Brazilian sites for the Bank of Brazil and Universal Music, among others.

Symantec posted a security advisory in which it said that cyber criminals would rely on such attack methods as data theft, bandwidth saturation, and resource starvation. It also stated that critical infrastructure attacks are a possibility.

The cyber security firm said in the advisory:

“Public announcements by these groups are often used as a means to gain notoriety or media attention and can be of highly volatile credibility. These attacks are typically low scale consisting of DDoS activity against publicly accessible webservers, website defacement efforts, or data exploitation.”

Anonymous may be among the most notorious of cyber criminal groups, but there are many others – both groups and individuals – capable of causing a significant amount of damage to SMEs. Businesses would be wise to do all they can to prevent becoming a victim of widespread attacks by bolstering their IT security management team. It may seem like a superfluous move initially, but it is potentially critical in the long-term.