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

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.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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