The upcoming London Olympics is undoubtedly one of the most highly-anticipated sporting events 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 ...
We're nearing the opening of the 2012 Summer Olympics, which will be held this time in London in July. As the event starts to go in full swing, cybercriminals start mounting their scams and schemes to get users to click.
Users dreaming of watching the closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics live may find the said offer hard to resist as Visa Golden Space is supposedly inviting users to join a lottery for a chance to win a travel package ...
Cybercriminals are using another major sports event to scam users into giving out personal information.
We recently encountered a spam campaign that makes use of the "London 2012 Olympic Games" to give credence to their malicious scheme. The spammed messages have been crafted to make the recipients think they won a contest related to the said event.
We analyzed two spam samples. The first sample has a .DOC file attachment that the users are asked to fill out. The file asks for personal information such as the recipient's name, address, ...
Cybercriminals again exploited one of the most-awaited global sports events—the “2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics”—to propagate at least two of their malicious wares. They piggybacked on the Olympics fever to promote malware-ridden sites.
In an attempt to affect as many users as possible, cybercriminals poisoned Google search results regarding the upcoming event. As usual, clicking the malicious links to get the latest news lead to sites that either host a bogus Windows Media Player update (see Figure 1) or FAKEAV.
Trend Micro advanced ...
It has only been two months since the Beijing Olympics and athletes and sports fans have four more years before the next Olympics happens in London. Spammers are not waiting that long though, because even as early as now, the said 2012 global event is already being used in online scams.
Here's a screenshot of a spammed email message that masquerades as a lottery notification:
Figure 1. Sample of London Olympics spam
The email message informs the recipient that s/he is the winner ...
