Security Response

As expected, the arrival of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was accompanied by an increase in Olympics-related spam. From fake news to performance enhancing medication, spammers are taking full advantage of the Games to entice us to click their links and open their attachments.

The majority of the malicious links lead to one of a number of variants of Downloader, Backdoor.Trojan, Infostealer, Trojan.Erotpics, and, more recently, Trojan.Pandex. These threats, which use filenames such as get_flash_update.exe, get_flash_codec.exe and install.exe, are entry points for the target install which is a fake antivirus product.

The tried-and-true method of malicious file delivery for this round is the use of false news stories relating to the Olympics:

This particular link (circled in red in the above...

The term "hacktivism" often conjures up images of small groups of left-wing hackers defacing Web sites of political parties in an expression of outrage, coupled with demands of truth and justice for the down-trodden. This may have been the case ten years ago, but more recently hacktivism has broken the predefined mold in more ways than one.

The features of the Internet that make it such an invaluable tool for communicating with the global population also provide an avenue for disgruntled groups to voice their options, send messages of unity to the like-minded at great speed, and coordinate electronic attacks. The development of distributed denial-of-service kits, combined with their ease of use and the ability to globally distribute them in minutes, effectively means that an entire country can mobilize a group of dedicated attackers, numbering in the millions, in a relatively short time. Though a vast proportion of these 'net warriors are not security...