McAfee has given a warning that a Trojan has been included in a media download file. The file scored an infection rate of 27% which McAfee says is the most significant bit of malware they’ve seen in years.
The Trojan malware, Downloader-UA.h, was added to the McAfee database several days ago. In the past 24 hours, it has been detected by McAfee VirusScan Online on more than 119,000 computers out of almost 436,000 scanned, an infection rate of 27%. Other malware McAfee is tracking exhibits an infection rate in the 1% to 5% range.
The malware does not affect computers running Mac OS X.
The malicious media files appear to be either MP3 audio files or MPEG video files and can be found on file-sharing services like LimeWire and eDonkey. McAfee believes they were placed there by cybercriminals
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Now there’s a surprise.
The sheer spread of this thing is a sign how far and how fast malware can go through a system. Less appealing is the fact that MP3 can be such an effective medium for spreading it. Millions of people are glued to MP3, and it’s obviously vulnerable.
It could have been much worse. This software just produces a lot of adware, pop-ups, and other nuisances. There’s an exe. file attached to the media which loads an MP3 player, and the popups start from there.
It could just as easily have been mass loading viruses.
The malware has produced some apt sarcasm from InformationWeek’s users, including one comment that maybe Vista’s tyrannical account manager isn’t so unnecessary after all. Another commented that a DOS Trojan would have spread like wildfire.
The BBC:
McAfee said seeing such a large outbreak was rare because hi-tech criminals typically prefer to target their malicious creations to keep numbers manageable and to avoid detection.
In the last seven days McAfee said the trojan had been found on more than 500,000 of the PCs that notify the company when a malicious file is downloaded.
It added that, so far, only 10% seem to have gone as far as to install the fake codec and be plagued with pop-ups.
That’s still 50,000 people. Quite enough to produce a cyberplague.
Get enough morons loading malware, and the world could wind up back in the caves.
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Fake media file hits 500,000 PC users
