Hackers quickly move to exploit Bhutto assassination

**Glaswegian** · 12-30-2007, 08:02 AM

Within hours of yesterday's assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, malware makers exploited the breaking news to dupe users into downloading attack code, security researchers said Friday.

Searches for news about Bhutto's killing and the ensuing chaos in Pakistan listed sites p1mping a bogus video coder/decoder (codec), said analysts at McAfee Inc., Symantec Corp. and WebSense Inc.

For instance, WebSense found such a site simply by using "benazir" to search on Google. Meanwhile, McAfee quickly located 10 sites hosted on Blogger.com, Google Inc.'s blog service, that were spreading the fake codec.

The sites use the well-worn tactic of promising a video -- in this case one of Bhutto's assassination -- but telling Windows users that they need to install a new high-definition video codec, the program that decodes the digital data stream, to view the clip.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/...ce=rss_topic17

12-30-2007, 08:02 AM	#1 (permalink)
Glaswegian Moderator/ Rangemaster TSF Academy; Analyst, Security Team; Oor Wullie; TSF Surgeon and Resident Comic Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Glasgow Posts: 21,028 OS: Win XP Pro SP3 My System Blog Entries: 9	Hackers quickly move to exploit Bhutto assassination Within hours of yesterday's assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, malware makers exploited the breaking news to dupe users into downloading attack code, security researchers said Friday. Searches for news about Bhutto's killing and the ensuing chaos in Pakistan listed sites p1mping a bogus video coder/decoder (codec), said analysts at McAfee Inc., Symantec Corp. and WebSense Inc. For instance, WebSense found such a site simply by using "benazir" to search on Google. Meanwhile, McAfee quickly located 10 sites hosted on Blogger.com, Google Inc.'s blog service, that were spreading the fake codec. The sites use the well-worn tactic of promising a video -- in this case one of Bhutto's assassination -- but telling Windows users that they need to install a new high-definition video codec, the program that decodes the digital data stream, to view the clip. http://www.computerworld.com/action/...ce=rss_topic17 __________________ Iain - Defender of the Haggis and all things Scottish. I don't help by PM - post in the Forums. Ad-Aware::SpywareBlaster::SpyBot::SpywareGuard::SnoopFree::AVG Free::HOSTS File::HijackThis::Donate::5 Steps For Infected PCs Last edited by Glaswegian : 12-30-2007 at 08:03 AM.