Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Fake files attack half a million

In what’s being called the largest fake media file outbreak in three years, some 500,000 people have fallen prey to a phony music or video track that is actually a spyware-infested Trojan horse. Usually purporting to be a music track with an MP3 file extension (in this case, an MP3 track from the UK group Girls Aloud), the file is actually an installer that claims to require a special codec and a special media player to play back the file.

Install the codec and what you really get is a computer screen full of pop-ups delivered through a variety of malware programs. You can see what the infection process looks like by checking out the video on this post. The attack is being distributed primarily through peer-to-peer networks. This is hardly an original attack, but the scale is immense: Those 500,000 attacks occurred in the space of just one week.

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