NEW DELHI, INDIA: While China hosts the 2008 Summer Olympics in the capital of Beijing from August 8 to 24, 2008, malware authors are busy mounting attacks that play on this quadrennial sporting event, warns Trend Micro.

Reports have surfaced about a zero-day Microsoft Word vulnerability affecting Word 2000, 2002, and 2003. It is said to affect even patched versions of word-processing application on certain Microsoft Office versions.

Niraj Kaushik, Country Manager—India and SAARC, Trend Micro said, "When exploited, the unspecified remote code-execution vulnerability could allow remote attackers to take complete control of an affected system, or cause the application to crash."

Experts at Trend Micro's TrendLabs have confirmed that there are malicious .doc files spreading in the wild. They have also observed that these malicious files use Olympics to get more users to click on them. The samples that TrendLabs has come across are detected as TROJ_MDROPPER.ZT.

These files are zero-day exploits under vulnerability summary CVE-2008-2244 under the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) list of the national cyber security division of the US Department of Homeland Security.

Kaushik warned, "Among others, if you receive any e-mail that has an attachment file named attachment .doc, appeal_letter_of_fttj.doc, attend_the_opening_ceremony_of_the_29th_olympic_games_in_beijing.doc, five_resolutions.doc, or lingotto_con_fiat.doc, be warned that opening it may make your computer vulnerable to attack. Besides TrendLabs has also reported Trojan samples of .XLS and .PPT circulating, all drawing correlation to the ongoing Olympics and the Tibet conflict. The conflict relates to the Olympics as it has spurred pro-Tibetan parties to call for an Olympic boycott."

Unless the users are aware of this threat vulnerability, the impact may be enormous, suggested Kaushik, "The Olympics event having such a big fan-following, the potential of people unknowingly getting lured into opening such Trojanized files is huge. With 10,708 athletes competing in 28 sports for 302 gold medals, the Olympics is the most prestigious affair of its kind, and as such commands a worldwide audience. It is thus expected that it will be included in malicious users' arsenal of social engineering techniques."