Hackers use lust, YouTube...
2007-08-28 11:21
New York - Vanity and lust are proving to be deadly sins for some internet users.
A hacker group known as "Storm Botnet" over the weekend began flooding the internet with e-mails, inviting web users to watch a salacious video starring them on YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google Inc.
One such e-mail 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..." It then provides a link to a purported video.
However, links in the e-mails actually point to attacker-operated sites that try to download several malicious programs onto vulnerable personal computers, according to Roger Thompson, chief technical officer at Exploit Prevention Labs, a New Kingstown, Pa, security company.
"Everybody thinks a YouTube video is perfectly safe, and in reality it is," Thompson said. "You're not actually getting to YouTube."
Once infected, victim PCs become spam machines, "zombies" that Storm Botnet can use to attack others on the internet with floods of traffic, and web servers that further distribute the group's malicious programs to other PCs.
The attackers also plant a rootkit in victim PCs that tries to hide the malicious programs so antivirus software can't remove them. Exploit Prevention Labs' LinkScanner product protects against the threat, and the company provides free online checks of suspect links at linkscanner.explabs.com.
The attack exploits more than a half dozen flaws in software used by computers with Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system, including Internet Explorer, Quicktime and WinZip.
Computers that are up-to-date with all security patches are safe, unless they respond to a prompt built into the attack that cleverly invites them to click on another link if they are unable to view the video.
Storm Botnet, which commands an apparently massive network of home PCs infected with its programs, has also been responsible for a flood of malicious e-mails recently that have offered fake electronic greeting cards.