Beware of March Madness, criminal hackers are at it again, after Valentine's Day their phishing agenda has moved to the next topic. They are now spoofing popular March Madness websites, and that includes bracket sites and live game streaming. Last season, traffic activity from users streaming games and checking brackets for updates increased by 100% during the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Also, monitoring sites observed an increase in malicious activity related to this category and discovered a clear upward spike in malicious activity, such as phishing pages, adware downloads, and attempted domain squatting. All of this is going on again this year, and it will be on your corporate networks if you do not take proactive measures.
Make sure your email filters are getting updated consistently and as often as possible.
Next, I suggest you send this email to your employees, friends and family. Feel free to copy/paste/edit:
Heads-up! The bad guys are at it again, this time with March Madness. They are sending phishing emails, and try to lure you to scam sites that are copies of legit sites that cover brackets and stream games. That way they steal your username and password which they can use to hack into our network and perhaps other sites where (we hope not!) you have used the same password. So, only use NCAA-sanctioned, official sites and apps and don't make this March Sadness!
For KnowBe4 customers, we have a few brand new templates in the Current Events category, three NCAA flavors and also a few very recent other phish-bait current events. Here is a screenshot!
Send these to your users to inoculate them against the current threats!
