The FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil is being used as a lure for numerous tricks aimed to get your money or show you unsolicited advertisements.
Last month Symantec wrote about an email scam where the scammers offered free tickets for the World Cup.
Following on from this, Dmitriy Bestuzhev of Kaspersky warns of problems installing Adware toolbars on your computer.
Adware programs are generally considered as Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) and are detected by most of AV companies as such. Many toolbars substitute your search engine and home page, which often lead to filtered search results that include advertisements and other offers. Adware programs frequently collect information about Internet surfing habits cached inside a browser in order to serve adverts based on your browsing behavior. Taking a closer look at a privacy policy of such a program, we can find the following terms regarding showing so called “Third Party Content”:


“You might be provided with content by using our Website and/or Software. This content may include third parties' websites, advertisements or links for applications and any other software and/or services ("Third Party Content") and We do not warrant its quality or authenticity. We are not, nor shall We be, liable or responsible for any damage that might occur when You use and/or rely on Third Party Content and do not warrant that Third Party Content will be available or accurate.”


This is an attempt, by the vendor, to avoid responsibility for any harm that might be caused by “third parties' websites, advertisements or links for applications and any other software and/or services”.
Typically, searching for trending topics can lead to problematic applications. When searching Google for “Free World Cup 2014 Live Video Streaming”, 251 000 000 pages were found. Many of the results offer the ability to watch live football streams. When clicking on a download button often a video player installer or other software that will unlock and play video is downloaded.

When scanning the file with Virustotal we get the results suggest it is not recommend to install this flash player:

Another problem is using dubious paid services, also touched on by Dmitriy Bestuzhev in his article, that offer premium access to watch World Cup live streaming in HD quality.

After clicking on this page we got the following form to fill:

Before submitting your personal information we recommend to check a reputation of the service, for example, using www.mywot.com or www.phishtank.com.

The results tell us this website has a poor reputation - one of the users does not recommend using this service as it just sells free streams available on the Internet.
In conclusion we would recommend you take care when searching for World Cup information and services, verifying them with online reputation and fraud scanning services, such as MyWOT and Phishtank.

Ad-Aware with enabled Web protection will definitely help you to protect against downloading problematic video players with adware on board. You can also use our new beta of Web Companion to block malicious URls, protect your home page and search engine against unsolicited modifications by adware.

Finally, if you have no TV nearby, you still can watch World Cup broadcasts for free provided by big media providers like it is recommended here.

In case you already have PUPs installed on your computer you can find the removal guidelines on some of them in the company’s blog:
• How to Remove Driver Performer
• How to Remove Movies! Toolbar
• How to Remove Default–Search.Net
• How to Remove LookSafe
• How to Remove SweetPacks Toolbar
• How to Remove SpeedUpMyPC
• How to Remove PC Performer
• How to Remove NewPlayer Ads and Coupons

Read also:
Lavasoft Security Bulletin - June 2014: Top Threats.
Lavasoft Security Bulletin - June 2014: Bot Review.