The National Cyber Security Centre is encouraging sports fans to protect their online streaming accounts ahead of a summer of major sporting events.
Hackers can break into streaming accounts if they use weak passwords that can be easily guessed or have been compromised in the past. The NCSC’s Cyber Aware guidance urges fans to make strong passwords up of three random words and save these in a browser to remove the burden of remembering them.
Once accounts are breached, hackers can use account holders’ information to make unauthorised payments or harvest data to use for phishing emails and scam calls. If you are a business owner and you are using the same credentials for personal and business accounts, and your credentials are breached, you could be looking at a cyber attack wreaking havoc within your business.
By using the six key Cyber Aware steps, supporters will protect themselves from most cyber crime and be alert to online scams, including the selling of bogus tickets.
The NCSC has previously revealed that hundreds of thousands of online accounts compromised in past data breaches used popular football team names (liverpool 280,723; chelsea 216,667; arsenal 179,095; manutd 59,440 and everton 46,619).
To securely stream sports this summer, the NCSC recommends that fans;
Refresh account passwords: It’s a great time for fans to consider resetting their password. We’re increasingly seeing hackers use credentials stolen in past security incidents to hijack streaming accounts using the same compromised details. If you’re using the same password for your sports streaming accounts that you’ve used multiple times in the past – it’s time for a reset.
Set a strong password: The most important password is the one that belongs to your email. That password must be different from all your other accounts’ passwords. If a cyber criminal breaks into your email account, they’re able to change the passwords to your other accounts by abusing the “forgot your password” feature. To create strong passwords, we recommend making them up of three random words. These passwords can be stored in your browser so you don’t need to remember them.
Update streaming apps: Cyber criminals exploit weaknesses in apps to access your sensitive personal data. Providers regularly issue patches to these exploits in updates – you’re vulnerable without them so we urge every fan to make sure their streaming apps are updated. To make it simple going forward, we recommend turning on automatic updates.
Anybody who thinks that they have received a scam email or text message can report this by forwarding suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk and texts to 7726. The report will be investigated, and action will be taken against malicious content where found.