Squid Game – the new hotspot for hackers

Hyderabad: Netflix’s Squid Game has become the new breeding ground for cybercriminals to gain access to user data and fulfill their malicious deeds. The highly popular web-series, which has had over 142 million views globally, is being targeted in different ways and methods ranging from fake costume stores to malicious websites that offer an online […]

Hyderabad: Netflix’s Squid Game has become the new breeding ground for cybercriminals to gain access to user data and fulfill their malicious deeds. The highly popular web-series, which has had over 142 million views globally, is being targeted in different ways and methods ranging from fake costume stores to malicious websites that offer an online version of the game shown in the web series.

One such threat is through sharing of malicious files which promise to show an episode from the series. Kaspersky reports that one of the schemes worked as follows: the victim was shown an animated version of the first game from the series, simultaneously, a Trojan was invisibly launched that could steal data from users’ various browsers and send it back to the attackers’ server. It also found mobile malware exploiting Squid Game wherein hoping to download an episode of Squid Game, the user downloaded a Trojan.

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Another type of threat is putting up Squid Game-related fake stores that intend to sell Halloween costumes. “Most of them offer an opportunity to buy the costumes just like players wore in the series and they falsely position themselves as official. Users end up sharing with cybercriminals their banking and personal identity information since they are asked to provide card details and personal data,” the report says.

With the game shown in the web series becoming a hit, many pages are offering an online version of the game to win the main prize which is 100 BNB (Binance coin). Needless to say, the player never receives the promised reward and ends up losing their data or downloading malware.

“The Squid Game becoming a new hit lure was just a question of time. As the ‘Squid Game’ is hyping, we observe many phishing pages offering to buy the recognizable suits from the show; other ones invite users to play the games from the show online. It’s extremely important for users to check the authenticity of websites when looking for a source to stream the show or to buy some merchandise,” comments Anton V. Ivanov, security expert at Kaspersky.

Advice for users:
• Check the authenticity of websites before entering personal data and only use official webpages to watch or download movies.
• Pay attention to the extensions of files you are downloading – a video file will never have an .exe or .msi extension.
• Use a reliable security solution that identifies malicious attachments and blocks phishing sites.

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