The upcoming London Olympics is undoubtedly one of the most highly-anticipated sports event of the year. It is also a favorite social engineering ploy among cybercriminals. Just recently, we found an Olympics scam in the form of a lottery that promises a free travel package to the event. Some online crooks, however, played it differently this time. Instead of the typical Olympic-related scams wherein users supposedly won tickets to the event, this scam arrives as spam disguised as an email advisory.
Readers who frequent this site surely know that this is just one of the many Olympic-related scams that we have seen in the past. As early as October 2008, spam messages were found masquerading as Olympic 2012 lottery notifications. Other sports events like the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the FIFA World Cup were also no strangers to this type of ruse.
As London Olympics 2012 draws near, we are expecting this type of threats to proliferate. Thus, users should make it a habit to check the legitimacy of any message before downloading the attachment or clicking links included in it.
Trend Micro users are protected from this threat via Trend MicroT Smart Protection NetworkT, which detects and deletes all the related malware. Trend Micro Deep Security also shields systems from being exploited via Rule 1004498 – Word RTF File Parsing Stack Buffer Overflow Vulnerability.
To know more about the previous threats that took advantage of the Olympics, World Cup and other major sporting events, you may read our entry Sports as Bait: Cybercriminals Play to Win.
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