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It seems like the hackers never give up on inventing new
methods to lure people to unsafe sites. The latest trend is an e-mail that
urges recipients to watch a video of themselves on YouTube.
As you may imagine, there is no video and the users who are accessing
the link sent in e-mail are redirect to a fake site, set up to infect their
computer with malware.
The infected computers are transformed into spam machines, which
are used used to attack others on the internet with floods of traffic, as
security experts explained
According to experts, this new scheme was created by a hacker
group known as "Storm Botnet". They started to send email over the
weekend.
One such email is headlined "OMG, what are you
thinking," and reads: "this i [sic] not good. If this video gets to
her husband your both dead. see for yourself..."
According to Exploit Prevention Labs, which first reported
the fake e-mails, the link in the spam leads to a site that downloads the
Q4Rollup package, an encrypted collection of keyloggers, spyware, rootkits and
other malware.
The security experts warned the users not to click the links
in order to avoid the security problems.
"McAfee advises people to use caution when clicking on
links in e-mails," said Dave Marcus, security research and communications
manager at McAfee. "We expect these spammers to continue to use these
types of tactics and it will be imperative that users get educated on how to
avoid becoming a victim."
Also, it was said that the exploit package is not a real
threat for computers that have the latest security patches installed.
Though, maybe it’s better for you to simply ignore such
messages if they weren't sent from a familiar e-mail address.
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