Spammers Use Fake Tibetan Statement on the Olympics

As early as March 2012, we have spotted a number of Tibetan-themed campaigns, and we’ve documented some of them through this blog. So far, the attacks are pretty consistent: they usually arrive as emails with pro-Tibetan sentiments as subjects, and have malicious file attachments.

Very recently, however, we found one Tibetan-themed campaign that also touches a very relevant current event: the 2012 summer Olympics in London.

As seen above, the email message is consistent with the typical techniques observed in other Tibetan-themed spam campaigns. In this case, however, the attached compressed file includes a decoy .DOC file with the file name China’s Olympic Legacy.docx. Along with it are two malicious executables, poster.scr and Tibet and Olympics.scr, which Trend Micro both detect as TROJ_DROPPER.WSD. These Trojans drop TROJ_RUGENT.A, display the images shown below, and then delete themselves.

TROJ_RUGENT.A, once executed, connects to certain URLs to send and receive information. Its routines may include the collecting of information about the affected system and its user.

Trend Micro users are now protected from this threat through the Smart Protection Network, which blocks the spam messages and detects the malicious files.

This is not the first Olympic-related threat we’ve seen, and it is highly unlikely that this will be the last. To check on these kinds of threats, you can visit Race to Security, the Trend Micro security guide to major sporting events such as the Olympics:

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