With the Beijing Olympics quickly approaching, both hackers and athletes are getting ready for the sports competition. Unfortunately, they have different purposes and, even if we all want to see a fair-play event, it seems that hackers are planning to cheat. According to MessageLabs, the company has detected no less than 13 different Olympic themed attacks, all of them being based on the upcoming competition hosted by Beijing. No matter what name the malicious emails had, they included legitimate details and claimed they were sent by the International Olympic Committee.

Just like usual, this kind of scams want to deploy some sort of malware on readers' computer and then, conduct other malicious activities. Very often, the attacks attach executable files which, once downloaded and installed, compromise the affected computer waiting for other commands from the attacker. However, according to MessageLabs, hackers are slowly migrating to other file formats in order to bypass security software installed on users' systems.

The Microsoft Office Database (MDB) format is one of the files which are now being used by Olympics hackers, but analysts predict even more formats used in the past including here ROR, ROL, ADD and SUB.

"These attacks are highly targeted at organizations that have highly confidential and valuable data, such as military and government bodies. Presuming that you haven't been targeted isn't proof that you haven't. The malicious EXE file can remain undetected for several months so it may be that your organization has been penetrated and crucial information has already leaked," Alex Shipp, MessageLabs Senior Anti Virus Technologist and Imagineer, said.

"Businesses need to up their game and fortify themselves against a dangerous new breed of hacker, Hacker 3.0, who is prepared to stop at nothing to achieve their goal."