Symantec has revealed that it expects a massive increase in spam and other malicious activities from today onwards, as cybercriminals seek to profit from a surge of interest in the games.
And with the first match taking place in around a week, Symantec has opened a World Cup microsite called `Net Threats monitoring' where it is giving out free updates on the latest in scams, spam, phishing and malicious code.
Rather than the data flowing all one way, Symantec says that it has opened a football-related security forum on the microsite, for like-minded people to discuss what scams, phishing exploits and similar activities are causing problems on the internet.
There is also a Twitter account for users of the microblogging service to follow Symantec World Cup security threats on - http://twitter.com/2010NetThreat.
In parallel with the World Cup threats service, Symantec says that internet users should unclutter their mailboxes, by unsubscribing from legitimate mailings that they no longer want to receive.
Users should also be very selective about the websites where they are required to register their email address for more football information.
At the same time, Symantec says users should avoid publishing their email address on the internet and delete all suspected spam without clicking on any suspicious links in messages - or IM messages.