Fake YouTube Emails May Infect Your PC

By Max Brenn
22:43, August 28th 2007
95 votes
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Fake YouTube Emails May Infect Your PC

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.



© 2007 - 2008 - eFluxMedia
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