Olympic malware poses as US Women’s Gymnastics scandal video

Gabrielle DouglasSophosLabs has intercepted a malware campaign that has been spammed out, exploiting interest in the London Olympics which are currently making headlines and filling TV schedules around the world.

The emails, which have been spammed out so far in limited numbers, all have a subject line designed to entice sports fans into opening the messages:

Huge scandal with the USA Women's Gymnastics Team on the 2012 London Olympics

Olympic spam

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Part of the email reads:

Recent Olympic gold medal winner, USA Women's Gymnastics winner Gabrielle Douglas, faces a lifetime ban after reportedly testing positive to banned diuretic furosemide. With details of the case still emerging, British Olympics Committee has ordered a suspension of the athlete until final results arrive.

View the video on youtube now

However, clicking on the link takes you not to the real YouTube website, but a lookalike webpage that runs various pieces of JavaScript code, and asks users to download an Adobe Flash plugin to view the content.

Sophos products detect the malware as Troj/Agent-XIK and Troj/JSRedir-IA.

As always, remember to think twice before following links in unsolicited messages. And, if you really want to keep up-to-date with the latest goings-on from the London Olympics, visit an established news website for the headlines – don’t trust an email that arrives in your inbox out of the blue.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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