Hackers are already targeting the PyeongChang Winter Olympic games a month before they start, according to a newly published report.

Security researchers at McAfee Inc. have found a campaign to target PyeongChang Olympics that began Dec. 22, with the most recent activity appearing Dec. 28. The campaign primary targeted the email account of icehockey@pyeongchang2018.com, but several other organizations also receiving the email via BCC shares. The email was purported to be from South Korea’s national counterterrorism council.

The emails came with a malicious file that included an embedded PowerShell script that can establish an encrypted channel to the attacker’s server, giving those behind it the ability to execute commands on the victim’s machine and to install additional malware.

The full report from McAfee goes through its efforts to trace the origin of the attack across the globe, but ultimately, perhaps with a sense of humor, researchers conclude that the attack has the hallmarks of “a nation state adversary that speaks Korean.”

Olympic Games have always been popular targets for hackers, such as London 2012 and Rio 2016. But with this year’s games being held in South Korea, already a favorite target for hackers for its “Korean speaking neighbor” to the north, it’s likely that this is the first of many attempts to hack the event.

“With the upcoming Olympics, we expect to see an increase in cyberattacks using Olympics-related themes,” the McAfee researchers concluded. “In similar past cases, the victims were targeted for their passwords and financial information. In this case the adversary is targeting the organizations involved in the Winter Olympics by using several techniques to make it more tempting to open the weaponized document.”

While seemingly continuing to target South Korea, North Korea is scheduled to hold talks with South Korea on Tuesday. They will be the first direct talks between the two countries in two years in an effort to end tensions that have brought peninsula to the brink of renewed hostilities. Despite claims by media that the countries are on the brink of war, the two countries have been officially at war since June 1950 because no peace treaty ending the Korean War was ever signed, only an armistice agreement.

Photo: PyeongChang Olympic Games