Ah, the World Cup…the emotion, the patriotism, the slide tackling. There’s really nothing quite like it. Every four years the best soccer teams—or football teams depending on where you’re reading this—in the world come together on the pitch to really stick it to each other, nation against nation, heritage against heritage. However, head butts and elbows to the face aren’t the only things getting red cards during the 2010 World Cup. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the global popularity of the tournament by preying on computer users surfing the Internet for updates on their favorite teams. So, Symantec is interested in learning a little more about your Internet surfing and anything suspicious online you may have encountered involving the World Cup. A short survey on the subject can be found here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AS6UQSGEW. To provide some perspective on what kinds of cons are circulating around, Symantec recently identified a new scam in which e-mails purporting to be from the promotions manager of the South Africa World Cup Lottery 2010 are making the rounds. Recipients are informed in an attachment that their e-mail address has been randomly selected by a specially designed computer program and that they have won US$2.5 million. Of course, none of it is real. Our survey should only take one to two minutes to complete and is completely anonymous. So, if you’re up for it, please take just a couple minutes to answer our questions and help us understand a little more about how you’re planning on using the Internet to follow the World Cup and what kinds of nefarious activities you’ve encountered. By the way, stay tuned to this space as we’ll be reporting on the anonymous survey results as soon as everything is wrapped up. This is also a good opportunity to reflect upon a few related online security best practices: