PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware

**Glaswegian** · 06-30-2009, 01:55 PM

It didn't take long. Security researchers are reporting that hackers have begun to use the death of pop star Michael Jackson to infect people's PCs, just as they predicted.

Starting late last week and continuing today, messages posing as breaking news alerts from the likes of CNN and the Los Angeles Times have been reaching users' mailboxes, said several security companies, including Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro.

Some of the messages, which have appeared only in Spanish and Portuguese so far, include links claiming to lead to video of Jackson in an ambulance, or even of his body postmortem. The links, of course, take users to nothing of the kind. Instead, they force a pop-up message that instructs the user to update their copy of Adobe's Flash.

The Flash update ploy may be a now-standard hacker tactic, but it's worked extremely well in the past. Last summer, for example, fake CNN.com news notifications led massive numbers of users to thousands of hacked websites that served up fake Flash software.

According to Trend Micro's analysis, the fake news emails try to trick users into downloading a bot Trojan that hijacks PCs, then awaits instructions from the botnet's controller.

"Quite notable is that even if a user chooses the Cancel button, which should allow him/her to quit from downloading the file, the site will continue to push the download of the codec, leaving users with no choice but to deal with the malicious file downloaded into their system," blogged Trend's Argie Gallego, one of the company's anti-spam research engineers.

http://www.techworld.com/security/ne...&NewsID=118272

**newbee_4** · 07-04-2009, 03:27 AM

just wondering - does this still lead to infection if you are surfing from a Limited account (Win XP) - or does it get past that?

06-30-2009, 01:55 PM	#1 (permalink)
Glaswegian Moderator/ Rangemaster TSF Academy; Analyst, Security Team; Oor Wullie; TSF Surgeon and Resident Comic Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Glasgow Posts: 25,576 OS: Win XP Pro SP3 / Win 7 Pro My System Blog Entries: 10	PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware It didn't take long. Security researchers are reporting that hackers have begun to use the death of pop star Michael Jackson to infect people's PCs, just as they predicted. Starting late last week and continuing today, messages posing as breaking news alerts from the likes of CNN and the Los Angeles Times have been reaching users' mailboxes, said several security companies, including Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro. Some of the messages, which have appeared only in Spanish and Portuguese so far, include links claiming to lead to video of Jackson in an ambulance, or even of his body postmortem. The links, of course, take users to nothing of the kind. Instead, they force a pop-up message that instructs the user to update their copy of Adobe's Flash. The Flash update ploy may be a now-standard hacker tactic, but it's worked extremely well in the past. Last summer, for example, fake CNN.com news notifications led massive numbers of users to thousands of hacked websites that served up fake Flash software. According to Trend Micro's analysis, the fake news emails try to trick users into downloading a bot Trojan that hijacks PCs, then awaits instructions from the botnet's controller. "Quite notable is that even if a user chooses the Cancel button, which should allow him/her to quit from downloading the file, the site will continue to push the download of the codec, leaving users with no choice but to deal with the malicious file downloaded into their system," blogged Trend's Argie Gallego, one of the company's anti-spam research engineers. http://www.techworld.com/security/ne...&NewsID=118272 __________________ Iain - Defender of the Haggis and all things Scottish. I don't help by PM - post in the Forums. PC Safety & Security::PC running a bit slow?::Donate::Photographers Corner

07-04-2009, 03:27 AM	#2 (permalink)
newbee_4 I helped the forums. Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 183 OS: win xp	Re: PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware just wondering - does this still lead to infection if you are surfing from a Limited account (Win XP) - or does it get past that?