Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued a warning that UK’s sports sector especially the soccer league clubs are super vulnerable to cyber attacks as they can act as treasure troves to hackers when exploited.
The cyber arm of GCHQ says that hackers are targeting sports bodies with 3 common cyber tactics like business email compromise, cyber enabled fraud and shutdown of critical systems with ransomware.
Citing two incidents as an example in the report, the NCSC highlighted a case where emails of a premier league’s managing director were hacked before a deal could be formalized making the club’s bank to sort out ways to thwart a money transfer of £1 million to a fraudulent account in South Africa. In other scam, a racecourse staff lost around 15 million pounds to an eBay Scam that promised of sending equipment that never materialized.
“The impact of cyber criminals cashing on sporting events is true” said Paul Chichester, Director of Operations at the NCSC. He added that the sporting bodies should use the time in making their defense line efficient enough to thwart attacks on any scale.
NCSC says that some adversaries were launching cyber attacks on sporting bodies to tarnish the image of the nation on the whole in the international arena. The report adds that at least 70% of organizations, especially those related to soccer sport, were being targeted by cyber attacks every twelve months fetching a loss of 10K pounds per incident. And the numbers are doubling the average that hit the businesses operating in the UK on the annual note.
