It could be used as the reconnaissance phase for a spear fishing attack.
A website called beerbydesign.com was infected with a nasty payload recently (I think I posted a warning here) if you weren't fully patched up, best of luck and even then with zero day exploits security products can't guarantee to protect you.
A colleague at work altered me to a suss email. It had already passed through one layer of our security because it was individually crafted and not sent out wholesale so a/v & a/s signatures did not pick it up. So I took the email to a quiet corner and beat it up. I pretended to let it escape onto our network and it squealed to its mummy! our 3rd layer of security had its site as harmless. So I added a block rule.
Shoe websites are now starting to be targeted to harbour malware so look out for the spear phishing of senior female employees in HR being targeted next.
The attack will start with an email along the lines of - 'unfair dismissal claim' or something similar. Or they could send a direct link to infected website (not quite as sophisticated an attack)
The cyber crims are targeting hobbies & interest related websites. specialist web retailers can't afford adequate security and so their sites get hacked ready for a victim to click on.
So if a corporate internet report shows up sports,angling,cycling,shoe,clothing sites no-ones really going to spot anything untoward. but if a site came up as
www.soviethackers.ru or
www.iptheft.cn then alarm bells would ring.
so filling in a third party survey, where you go to a random website and fill in some questions. I don't advise it. Even a survey created on surveymonkey can be used to grab personal info useful to hack you.
So please be very suss by default. :thumb:
we are at risk including when we send links although youtube links are much safer than most.
Apologies for my random ramblings but I deal with a major security issue every week or two. Staff are actively encouraged to contact my IT team for anything strange or not quite right and this is what makes the difference. We can dissect the threat before its been activated and then we further adjust our security where necessary.
Because sooner or later someone will click on something
and then all bets are off.