Illegal Super Bowl Streaming Is a Security Nightmare

If you don’t have cable, but you want to see the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs fight it out in this year’s Super Bowl, you may find yourself among the millions of people worldwide seeking to stream the Big Game by any means possible.

Many viewers searching for Super Bowl livestreams will land on illegal sites seeking to steal data and install malware—a dark side to this otherwise festive event.

Last year, an estimated 7.7 million searched for “Super Bowl stream,” according to new data from VPNOverview(Opens in a new window). In total, the game attracted 99 million viewers (beyond just streamers), with 103 million tuning in for the halftime show. This year, search volume will likely be even higher. Beyond the game, viewers will want to catch Rihanna’s halftime show, her first major performance since her 2016 tour. Born in Barbados, she has among the largest(Opens in a new window) international fanbases of any artist.

While football is largely an American sport, potential streamers of the Super Bowl are all over the globe. Canada, home to the CFL(Opens in a new window) (short for Canadian Football League), edged out the US as the country with the most stream searches on a per-capita basis. The top five countries are all primarily English-speaking: Canada, the US, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Even the tiny island nation of Malta, located between the base of Italy and North Africa, made the top 10 list on a per-capita basis: 670 people searched for the game last year, netting out to 12.92 per 10,000 people.

Looking at all streaming searches, more Americans (3.5 million) tuned in online than any other nation, followed by Canada (402,440). Germany made the next top spot, with 120,250 people wanting to catch the Super Bowl.

But while you’re happily cheering on your team and taking in Rihanna’s latest fashion, illegal sites might be having a feeding frenzy on your data behind the scenes. And not incidentally, there are legal ramifications of illegal streaming.

“Unregulated streaming websites are as tempting as they are dangerous,” says Djordje Djordjevic of VPNOverview. “People are still gravitating toward them because they’re convenient and usually free (or…