The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games in China are finally underway and, unfortunately, the sporting events that have everyone's attention at the moment have also encouraged the circulation of a new eddy of cyber crime. This year sees the first time that the Olympics will have complete online global coverage - something that has been happily greeted by internet fans worldwide. However, it has been reported that people are finding Olympic-themed related junk email messages popping up in their inboxes. These phishing scams attempt to trick individuals into opening malicious email attachments and visit fraudulent sites. Furthermore, there are emails notifying people that they have won an Olympic lottery, which they will only be able to claim by entering their personal and financial details.
There is no doubt that spammers and hackers have seen this year's Olympic Games as an opportunity to take advantage of the uneducated and naive users of the Internet, with many individuals still largely unaware of the danger giving your details away can pose.
These malicious messages are largely being spammed using the Rustock botnet, which is a large spam campaign involving users clicking on a headline in an email which then opens a fake online video prompting the user to install a specific codec file in order to watch it. However, the user is unaware that they are actually downloading malware that installs the Rustock botnet software which, as a result, leads to their personal information being collected.
According to recent reports (and the inbox of a bigmouth's personal email account), the latest headlines that are attempting to dupe the public are related to online U.S. news channel CNN and the Beijing Olympics. These new campaigns appear more sophisticated and convincing to the recipient than many earlier generation scams.
While it's mainly users of Windows PCs that are being targeted, it is not only members of the public who are being damaged by these Olympic email threats. Fake messages are also being sent to trainers of athletes and national sporting organisations - and in these cases the sender appears to be the International Olympic Committee. The messages have an infected Adobe PDF file attached that poses a threat when downloaded.
The more aware people are of potential scams, the less likely they will be to fall for them - so spread the information to all of your less tech-minded friends and family and tell them that the 2008 Olympic Games may not be the only online activity worth watching out for this summer.
