Forget about Olympic medals. The gold and silver sought this year in Rio de Janeiro are the colours of credit and debit cards.
Brazil is arguably Latin America’s most digitally savvy nation, with more than half its 204 million population regularly using the internet.
When you have … something like the Olympic Games you have such a target-rich environment of rich targets
As many arriving tourists have quickly discovered, Brazil is also a leader in the use of digital technologies for the hacking of credit and debit cards.
“When you have … something like the Olympic Games you have such a target-rich environment of rich targets,” said Alan Brill, senior managing director of the cybersecurity practice for Kroll in New York. They are “people in many cases with far higher limits on accounts than otherwise … with more accounts, and more likely to use ATMs”.
The US cybersecurity research firm Fortinet, in a global report issued on Tuesday, warned that criminals have been ramping up for the Olympics, which run through August 21. That means they’ve been setting up malicious websites that unwary users will click on and unknowingly deliver their passwords and PIN numbers to criminals who will then use them to hack into the users’ credit and bank accounts.
“The volume of malicious and phishing artefacts (domain names and URLs) in Brazil is on the rise,” the company said, noting that the rate of increase in Brazil was several times higher than the rest of the world. “The highest percentage growth was in the malicious URL category, at 83 per cent, compared to 16 per cent for the rest of the world.”