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Beijing Olympics E-threats still Corrupting Systems

According to Vlad Valceanu, Head of Antispam Research at BitDefender Labs, the year of 2008 witnessed an intense competition for sending e-mail threats among spammers, malware authors and virus distributors. The competition began with starting of Beijing Olympics held in August 2008, as reported by thechannel on August 29, 2008.

BitDefender had predicted before starting of the grand sport event (Beijing Olympics) a tremendous increment of spam campaigns targeting the games and the prediction proved true.

BitDefender further revealed that e-mails linked to Olympics easily entered users' inboxes. Similar to the traditional spam techniques, these e-mails were mainly focused on hot celebrities headlines like - Michael Phelps - the US swimmer bring gold or nude picture of Sara Boberg, a Swedish archer.

According to the security company, these e-mails mainly depend on a paragraph or an attractive line to encourage sport enthusiasts read the message. Sometimes an image or a hyperlink to a detailed version of the story are inserted in mails to make sport lovers click on the spam messages.

As these e-mails are still wildly circulating on the net, online security providers are repeatedly warning users to avoid clicking on hyperlinks or links included in the Olympics related e-mails. According to them, these hyperlinks generally download or install malicious programs that severely infect the user's system configuration.

Valceanu from BitDefender stated that an e-mail claiming to show nude images of the Swedish athlete Sara Boberg misled the research team to a compromised Website that tried to a host of malicious payloads on the user's system instead of the Free Celebrity Movie Archive as depicted in flashy banner of the mail.

Elaborating the attack, BitDefender said that while downloading a supposed image of Sara Boberg, as found by the researchers, actually hiding an executable file along with a.avi.exe extension. This file is a Trojan by name Trojan.FakeAlert.AAH that inserts two more files into the system, capable to corrupt the wallpaper and later on displays a window. This window informs the users that his system is infected by a virus that needs to be immediately removed.

Related article: Businesses Asked To Shoulder Security Of Online Transactions

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