(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As Vancouver prepares for the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Olympic Games, the MessageLabs Intelligence research and response team has been busy identifying emails from cyber criminals attempting to use the Olympics to spread malware and stage targeted attacks.
According to MessageLabs (www.messagelabs.com), a division of hosted services provider symantec (www.symantec.com), there are two varieties of Olympic spam that are currently making rounds so far.
The first one is an email with the subject, “Information and resources to help you travel during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games. TravelSmart 2010.htm” includes legitimate links to genuine sites. But, a hidden iframe embedded in the email itself can be used to drop almost anything on the victim’s computer.
MessageLabs Intelligence has also detected an Olympic-themed targeted attack with the subject, “How to make Olympics more interesting?” While the body of the email is simple, there is an attached presentation program file which is malicious and attempts to use an exploit to install malware on the target machine.
“We have seen three instances of this attack so far in February, which is a very small number in terms of global malware, but by its nature it is not designed to be widespread,” MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst Paul Wood said in a statement. “As a targeted attack it is meant to attempt to gain access to a small number of specific users’ machines. If just one gets through, the damage to the victim could be substantial.”
To avoid becoming a victim during the 2010 Games, Symantec urges individuals to follow some best practices to make sure that over the course of this Olympic Games they don’t finish last. When buying tickets online, even from an auction site, make sure it is a reputable online source. For instance, Vancouver2010.com is offering fan-to-fan tickets on a first come, first-served basis.
Many cybercriminals are using extravagant promises such as “exclusive” Olympic pins and merchandise to lure victims into clicking through to malicious sites and divulging personal information.
Also, when clicking links from within emails or IM messages, know that they may contain viruses or Trojans, or lead to infected websites. Rather than clicking the link, type out the full website URL into the browser.
Legitimate 2010 Winter Games organizers/sponsors will never ask for personal, financial or password information through an email message so never fill out forms in the body of messages.
And finally, keep all personal and work computers are protected with up-to-date antivirus software and the latest operating system and application patches.
Proving that nearly anyone is susceptible, prior to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, MessageLabs found that a legitimate attachment that appeared in a message sent from Olympic mail servers containing security information was also masking a trojan. The documents appeared so convincingly to come from official sources that many victims forwarded the malicious messages on to other Olympic committee members.
