Fake warning about Olympic-themed scams carries malware

It’s three months to go until the start of the London Olympics 2012, and sports fans are searching for and buying tickets to the various events online.

Unfortunately, it’s inevitable that the interest surrounding such a huge global event will be misused by cyber criminals.

Trend Micro researchers have recently spotted an email campaign that apparently warns users about Olympics-themed scams, and purportedly offers a list of bogus sites and organizations selling fake tickets:

The attached .doc file is specially crafted to take advantage of the RTF Stack Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (CVE-2010-3333) in order to drop a backdoor Trojan into the target computer, allowing attackers to perform various malicious routines on it.

“As London Olympics 2012 draws near, we are expecting this type of threats to proliferate,” warn the researchers. “Thus, users should make it a habit to check the legitimacy of any message before downloading the attachment or clicking links included in it.”