Illegal football match streams planting malicious software

A new study has revealed that football fans who access free streams of top matches are putting their devices, and personal privacy, at significant risk; the most popular sites are attracting around eight million visits per month. Of the thousands of streams studied, the report found that as many as half planted malicious software on the users' machine through forced ads and other deceptive techniques. "If a person installs an extension to watch a stream, and then visits a site like BBC.com, this extension can actually change the contents of BBC.com as it appears in the user's browser so that it includes malicious links and advertising. This is extremely dangerous" says lead researcher, Zubair Rafique. 

Illegal sports streaming has become increasingly popular in recent years with hundreds of streaming portals offering live feeds of sports in varying quality for free. Some sites pull more than eight million visits per month from users seeking access to feeds.However, a study from Stony Brook University that thoroughly detailed how such streaming services work found that around half of the sites fed malicious software to users' devices either through malvertising or other deceptive measures, such as directing a user to a "plug-in" download.lead researcher Zubair Rafique told the BBC News website.Some countries already have forced ISPs to block sites offering unauthorized streaming of sports events, but with so many portals popping up it is impossible to block everything.