According to a new report from McAfee, attacks are increasingly being tailored to victims in specific geographical regions. Spam, phishing emails and even malware now address their potential victims in their native tongues, often with flawless grammar. Attackers have also become familiar with local culture, including sports and other pastimes, and often incorporate them into their ploys to further the chances of tricking their Marks.

"We really wouldn't have had this conversation two years ago," said Dave Marcus, a security research and communications manager at McAfee. Back then, "the distribution of malware was very English language centric."

As a result, spam and malware targeting Germans are likely to target their enthusiasm for the World Cup. Attacks on Japanese, meanwhile, are likely to piggyback on the popularity in that country of Winny, a P2P file sharing program. And Chinese scams will likely involve gold farming, which refers to the harvesting of virtual valuables in games such as World of Warcraft.

The multicultural celebration comes as more parts of the world connect to the internet for the first time. With a larger proportion of non-English speakers than ever before, it makes sense attackers are trying to find new, more effective ways to pwn their machines and steal their banking credentials.

Oleksandr Dorozhko made almost $300,000 in stock-option trading by using insider information that was obtained after someone hacked into a financial network and stole confidential information concerning a company called IMS Health. Now, the Ukrainian resident is exploiting a loophole that may allow him to keep the ill-gotten gains for good.
That's because US securities laws, unlike those in Europe and elsewhere, define insiders as those with a fiduciary role with a company - say, a corporate executive, investment banker or attorney. As a mere hacker, or as an associate to a mere hacker, Dorozhko had no such function, so the laws cannot be used to seize the assets, a federal judge has ruled.

The strange tale, which was reported here by The New York Times, reads like a chapter out of Catch 22. According to evidence presented by the Securities and Exchange Commission, minutes after someone broke into a network of Thomson Financial and stole a gloomy IMS Health earnings report scheduled to go public a few hours later, Dorozhko invested a little more than $41,000 in put options that bet the company's share price would plunge.