Trojan Attacks Multimedia Files Stored on Hard Drives

5:30 PM

By Kelly Jackson Higgins

Senior Editor, Dark Reading

A particularly aggressive Trojan is on the loose that infects multimedia files stored on a users hard drive.

“We’ve not seen such a sophisticated Trojan infecting multimedia files before,” says Christoph Alme, lead for the anti-malware team at Secure Computing, which has been studying the Trojan. “We’ve been seeing infected multimedia files for about a month now and [had been] wondering where they came from.”

Like many malware infections, it starts with a visit to a sketchy site -- in this case, a Warez site, where the user downloads what he thinks is a serial key for a copy-protected software package, for example, but instead gets the Trojan that automatically infests all of his multimedia files. When he shares one of those music or video files with another user via a peer-to-peer network, the recipient in turn gets infected by a fake codec: no Warez visit required.