Aug 20 2008
Beware! E-mail invitation for Beijing Olympics is E-mail virus!
Beware of any email invitation to the Beijing Olympics. The malicious mails are supposed to be as an invitation to the Olympics but actually these are E-mail virus which once opened affects MS word, MS PowerPoint and MS excel applications on your system. The virus could allow the remote attackers to take complete control of an affected system, or cause the application to crash.
Experts at Trend Micro’s TrendLabs have confirmed that these mails are malicious. Country Manager – India & SAARC, Trend Micro, Niraj Kaushik said, “When exploited, the unspecified remote code-execution vulnerability could allow remote attackers to take complete control of an affected system, or cause the application to crash.”
“Among others, if you receive any email that has an attachment file named attachment .doc, appeal_letter_of_fttj.doc, attend_the_opening_ceremony_of_the_29th_olympic_games_in_beijing.doc, five_resolutions.doc, or lingotto_con_fiat.doc, be warned that opening it may make your computer vulnerable to attack,” added Kaushik.
Experts said that the malicious .doc files are spreading in the wild which are taking benefit of the ongoing Beijing Olympics in China, the popular event of the time. This makes the receiver to click on the mail and open the files. The samples that TrendLabs has come across are detected as TROJ_MDROPPER.ZT.
Kaushik added, “The Olympics event having such a big fan-following, the potential of people unknowingly getting lured into opening such Trojanized files is huge. With 10, 708 athletes competing in 28 sports for 302 gold medals, the Olympics is the most prestigious affair of its kind, and as such command a worldwide audience. It is thus expected that it will be included in malicious users’ arsenal of social engineering techniques.”
These files are zero-day exploits under vulnerability summary CVE-2008-2244 under the Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE) List of the National Cyber Security Division of the US Department of Homeland Security.
Besides TrendLabs has also reported Trojan samples of .XLS and .PPT circulating, all drawing correlation to the ongoing Olympics and the Tibet conflict. Trend Micro detects the malicious Excel file as TROJ_MDROPPER.ZY, and the PowerPoint file as TROJ_PPDROP.M. Unlike the Word file malware, these Excel and PowerPoint files are not confirmed to have zero-day vulnerabilities as yet.
If you are also getting these kinds of mails, do not take as an invitation. It is malicious mails which can damage your system. Avoid opening them and delete them at once.
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