US Military Infected With Porn Viruses on DVDs

US troops in Iraq are facing a little-noticed problem and that involves DVDs. The Washington Post reports that the US soldiers, who pick up pornographic DVDs in local markets, often get more than the bargain. A virtual load of viruses lies hidden in the pirated DVDs, and these spread rapidly among soldiers viewing them on their system by turn.

Pornographic viruses actually are the computer viruses or the tiny software programs designed to pass from computer to computer, and to meddle with the systems' operation. When a virus infects a system, it might delete or corrupt the data on it, use the owner's e-mail system to transmit its copy to other PCs, or even delete everything on the hard disk. This malware often comes in disguise, pretending to be attachments of greeting cards, interesting images, or video and audio files.

The porn viruses seem to be a hard to deal with, and people other than American soldiers are also becoming victims of the Cyber Transmitted Diseases (CTDs). Michael Noonan, Army Reserve Captain, who trained an Iraqi army troop in 2006-07, told The Washington Post that the Iraqi soldiers too were mad for porn. He also noted that his USB stick would become dirty with viruses each time he had to collect documents from his section NCOs or his counterpart, as reported by theinquirer on May 12, 2008.

The incident simply indicates that a soldier needs to exercise caution every time he plugs his memory stick to any place because whilst dispersing democracy the army could also be spreading other things.

According to security experts from Symantec and TrendLabs, detachable drives like USB (universal serial bus) drives are becoming effective mediums for spreading malware or computer viruses.

Sharing the results of anti-virus research by TrendLabs, conducted over the recent years, TrendLabs' Advance Threat Specialist, Marvin Cruz, said that numerous malware are now propagating themselves via USB drives, as reported by inquirer in April 2008.

According to Cruz, this could be because such an infection is programmatically simple to do. Moreover, the propagation is more effective as many users are not aware of its method of working for preventing the infection, he said.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 5/16/2008