Trojan Poses as Nude Movie Stars

A new Trojan is showing the naked pictures of female celebrities such as movie stars Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman. The computer virus spreads via e-mail on Windows-based PCs.

As the malicious spam scam that tries to convince users of showing shocking nude images of these celebrities gets widespread, Sophos, the IT security and control company, is cautioning users about the sinister e-mail. The company is urging them to give a moment's thought before opening attachments in unsolicited e-mails.

The attachment contains the Dloadr-BCP Trojan and a rootkit. There are, however, no photographs in it. As the Dloadr-BCP Trojan infects the Windows program, it downloads additional malware from the Net and installs it onto the affected computer. Sophos has rated the malware's prevalence low to medium.

The message content in the e-mail wishes a good morning and then lures the recipient to open the attachment to view shocking video of nude Angelina Jolie and then signs off with best regards. The e-mail attachment is a typical .ZIP file and is named amazing.zip. It contains an executable, shocking.zip.

These e-mails pretend as pornographic materials that tempt unsuspecting users into opening a malicious file on their PCs running Windows. These files drop a rootkit and pull down more malware from the Internet. This is not a new social engineering tactic. In fact, cyber criminals used it so often that it appears to be around from the time of silent movies. Despite that, it is still used as an effective technique to dupe many users into executing code that would allow hackers to seize their computers, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. Sophos published this in news on August 2, 2007.

The past has also seen similar virus e-mail scams surrounding music, sporting and screen stalwarts like Paris Hilton, Halley Berry, Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Julia Roberts, Anna Kournikova, and Jenifer Lopez.

In order to best defend oneself, Sophos suggested users to practice good computing habits. This includes getting anti-virus, firewall and keep security patches up-to-date and also deciding on what programs would be the safest to run on the computer.

Related article: Trojans to Target VoIP in 2006

» SPAMfighter News - 14-08-2007

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