In a company blog from McAfee, Robert Siciliano warns that hackers may be targeting fantasy football players because of the sheer number of participants in the growing industry. Hackers tend to target high traffic areas to increase the likely hood of success in a cyber attack and the growing popularity of fantasy sports falls in that category.
The Fantasy Sports Trade Association estimates that 41 million people player fantasy sports in the US and Canada this year. And that number has grown each and every year. In addition, the typical fantasy players are looking at several sites to build up their fantasy team. Finally, there have been a number of new sites that offer both games and content to fantasy players that thieves can use to disguise their motives.
Siciliano outline three possible attack areas that fantasy players should keep in mind. Viruses/worms can be included in attachments, malware can be installed by going to infected sites, and thieves can try to hack into sites to an attempt to steal credit card information.
FtSb Says: With the popularity of fantasy sports comes the thieves. You can say that this is a right of passage for the popularity of fantasy sports as it become mainstream. I remember several years ago when Apple users boasted how their software was never hacked. Well that was when Apple had only a small number of users when compared to Microsoft Windows. Then Steve Jobs came back and now iOS and Apple are one of target rich environments for thieves.
