Storm variant targets Olympics fans

Malware writers are using the upcoming Beijing Olympics as a hook

Security organisations have warned of a new virus attack that uses the upcoming Beijing Olympics to spread a new variant of the Storm malware.

The vector of attack is an email purporting to contain the news that the Olympics will be delayed or cancelled due to earthquake damage.

Emails contain a link that claims to be a video to back up the information, but the file downloads an application named beijing.exe containing the Trojan.

"Some advice for the day: do not click on every link in your email," said Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur in a blog posting.

"It looks like the Peacomm [Storm] authors have decided to use past and future events in China as lures for their latest creation.

"A new spam run is in progress with links to a file called beijing.exe, which is currently detected by Symantec as Trojan.Peacomm.D."

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team has also issued a warning about the attack, saying that the emails have been widely spammed out and that phishing activity linked to the malware has already been detected.

Storm was one of the most successful Trojans of last year, with many infections reported.

There had been hopes that malware users were switching to other code but this latest attack has professionals worried that internet users could be facing another onslaught.

"The first time we saw Storm was when they sent out emails that reported violent storms through Europe. That's why we named it Storm," said Patrik Runald, security researcher at F-Secure.

"We are still expecting to see Storm, and other malware, use the Olympic Games in August as a social engineering trick, so be on the lookout for those in a few weeks."