The Georgia-Russia conflict is a major international (and security) problem, and people should have learned long ago that news organizations remain the logical avenues for news, if they want more information on the issue.

However, true to form, spammers are using this conflict, as can be seen in the following spammed email message reported by Trend Micro Advanced Threats Researcher Ivan Macalintal:

Figure 1. Spam message leveraging on the Georgia-Russia conflict

According to Trend Micro Advanced Threats Analyst Joey Costoya, the links in the message point to the Web site (seen below) that leads to no 46 breaking news and 27 “shocking videos,” but the malicious file INSTALL.EXE instead. Trend Micro detects this file as TROJ_XCHANGER.B.

As the malware is downloaded onto the system, the following page is displayed:

Figure 2. Fake video page tricking users into thinking that the link is harmless

Trend Micro users are already protected by the Smart Protection Network. Of course, there will probably be more threats like this so users are advised to be extra careful in clicking links or downloading files from untrusted, unknown, or unexpected sources.