Virus outbreak tied to fake YouTube e-mails

Viewing this YouTube video could be dangerous to your computer's health.

 

That's a warning from the technology security specialists at Sophos, who are tracking the latest virus outbreak being delivered through malicious e-mails purporting to be links to YouTube videos, with such enticing subjects as: "Dude, what if your wife finds this?"

Security experts believe the current virus attack could precede a repeat of the massive pump-and-dump stock e-mail spam that occurred earlier this summer.

Pump-and-dump spam schemes use unsolicited e-mail to tout a company's stock, reaping profits for its instigatorfrom youtube emails last week. When you click on the link
s. After pumping the price with their hype, the stock sellers dump their shares and other investors are left with worthless stock.

The e-mails currently flooding inboxes pretend to be from friends warning the recipient they are on YouTube in some scandalous video. "I can't believe you put this video online. This video of you is all over the net. See for yourself," reads one warning in a bogus e-mail.

However, when the recipient clicks on the link expecting to see themselves online, it triggers a virus that takes over the computer, turning it into a so-called "zombie" that can be used to help spread more spam.

"What it is is a method of engaging the user into downloading a variant of the Storm virus," said Ron O'Brien, senior security analyst with Sophos.

O'Brien said the latest virus outbreak follows what would be considered by virus writers as a wildly successfully e-card campaign earlier this summer that saw computers infected when people clicked on a link purporting to be an electronic greeting card.

O'Brien said that method of delivery has faltered as awareness of it has spread. The latest technique is designed to replace it and build up more armies of infected, or zombie, computers.

"Think of the spam that sets up the infrastructure as being kind of the initial cycle," he said. "Then what they are able to do is they can rent out those (zombie) networks.

"We saw that infrastructure being put in place over the Fourth of July (weekend), followed by one of the largest pump-and-dump scams in history."

O'Brien said the current virus outbreak could be meant to repeat that performance.

"It does suggest very strongly that if the campaign is successful, those newly infected computers could be used to conduct an even larger spam campaign," he said.