The UK law enforcement agencies are also turning their attention to this, with the Metropolitan police already having established a specialist team to examine the threat of electronic and internet attacks on the 2012 Olympic games. It would also appear that they have detected some ‘precursor’ activity, with companies being set up in what they believe are false names in anticipation of fraud and other types of criminal activity during the run-up to the Olympics.

Now, I would also encourage you to take your own security precautions in the run up to and through, what is turning out to be, a world event. The Symantec Global Intelligence is detecting and picking up a surge of inauguration themed Spam. We have written about this here.

The tactic is the well- worn one of sensationalist email headings, with an embedded link, that takes you to a web site that ostensibly looks like an official Obama campaign web site. However, it is far from that. The web site will then automatically try and attack your web browser to surreptitiously install malicious software onto your machine.  Although, your machine maybe fully patched and therefore deflect this type of attack, the site hopes that your curiosity gets the better of you, and further hyperlinks on the site points to other malicious content.  We have detected the piece of piece of malicious software being used here under the name W32.waledac.  This particular piece of malware is capable of harvesting your machine for personal information, turning it into a spam zombie and also leaving a ‘back-door’, so that the hackers can come and go from your machine and use it at their will.

I have been in IT for nearly 20 years now, and throughout that time I have had the opportunity to help and participate in the launch of the many new products. Invariably, this involved the ‘live’ demo of the product. As soon, as the mention of this comes up from the marketing folk, you see the product people, starting to wince and recoil. Excuses are proffered, as to why this might not be necessary (read for that advisable).  The IT press have had the pleasure of experiencing, a veritable treasure trove of failed ‘live demos’. It is the stuff of legend in our industry.

We are making some very big claims with Norton 2009. We have a game changing product and it challenges many of the preconceptions and realities about security software.  So, I decided to proactively tell the PR and marketing folk that we needed to ‘walk the talk’. It was game-on for  the full live demo in front of some one hundred IT journalist from across Europe.

So, I did a full live demo of an install of the product in one minute. Norton Pulse updates streamed onto the machine every few minutes. The Press saw Norton Insight, our new real-time Whitelisting technology, determine that it need only scan 7% of the files running on the system.  They were able to see for themselves, the minimal impact that NIS 2009 was having on CPU cycles and memory and our new idle time scheduler purring away in the background.

So, I left the stage with a spring in my step. NIS 2009 had simply done what it was built to do and that which we are telling people it will do. But in doing so, it made a positive impact on those in the room.  I left the stage, safe in the knowledge, that Norton 2009, would not be joining the ‘hall of shame’ of live demos.

NAV and NIS 2009 are superb products. Many people have come up to me in the past days, to tell me how impressed they are. I stand there and take the plaudits. But my thanks and admiration are for the team, who worked long and hard, with passion, innovation and tenacity to bring to market NAV and NIS 2009. Give yourself a treat, go and download a trial of them.

It would appear that a significant Distributed Denial of Service attack has been visited upon various Georgian Government sites and other Georgian internet servers.  A variety of Government sites have been targeted, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and the country’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, have been blocked completely, or traffic to and from those sites’ servers have been redirected to servers actually located in Russia and Turkey.

The speculation is that infamous Russian Business Network (RBN)is behind these attacks. The RBN is a notorious malware and criminal hosting network, albeit there actual involvement is yet to be proven.

There is a trend here. Going back to April 2007, we witnessed a DDoS on Estonia that took out parts of the internet infrastructure for some days.  The attacks coincided with a dispute between Estonia and Russian nationalists about the relocation of WWII era monuments.

I am sure that as part of any countries preparations for War now, include plans and preparations as to how they can protect and defend their internet infrastructure.

The Beijing Olympics start tomorrow. The World’s biggest sporting event of all time, I am sure that it will not disappoint.

In winning the Olympics, Beijing outlined that it would harness the power of IT, innovate around it, to bring the Games to new audiences. We will see a convergence of IT and Media on a scale not seen before. Many of the big Media companies and franchises have extensive plans to bring the games to the ‘net in a big way. I know that many network administrators are bracing themselves for the impact of ‘streaming’ video of Games – if they allow it on your corporate network.  It will be interesting to see (or maybe not) what the strain will be on your ISP as well. 

Where you have a mass audience connected to the ‘net, then in the shadows the’ bad guys’ will be lurking. In the Symantec State of Spam report for August, we are already seeing Spammers peddling their wares on the back of the Olympics. Symantec Security Response have already written up a blog on an attempted Phishing attack, purporting to sell tickets for the games. The creators of the site went to great lengths to make it convincing, even using an SSL connection, believe it or not. 

So, get on your marks, get set, and it is ‘Go’ for no doubt many Olympic related Spams, Phishing attempts, links to web sites that will be showing funny/curious videos of events of the games etc. So, I say, “Citius, Altius Fortius”, to all of my colleagues in the IT Security industry, to keep you all safe and for you to enjoy the Games.

In terms of the actual numbers of Mac specific malware, there is no doubt, there is an awful lot less. From that standpoint you are safer and there is a benefit. The game changer that Mac users need to be mindful of, is that bad guys are now attacking the individual and not the PC. Malware is morphing into crimeware. Increasingly, the attacks are financially motivated. This gives a simple focus for the bad guys. They care not for the merits of Windows versus or the Mac, or hold any particular view on Bill Gates or Steve Jobs: it is all about the money. We are seeing attacks, whereby, the code determines what OS or browser you have and then simply adjusts itself accordingly.

At the end of my pitch, some of the audience wandered up to ask some additional questions. They seemed assured in their investment in the Mac and respectful of the bigger picture that I shared with them. The questions they asked of me at the end were interesting and insightful. They tended to be about personal experiences of being phished, spammed or duped into visiting web sites etc. They are getting drawn into the world of malware and crimeware, albeit, from a different standpoint.