25 May 2007, 11:43

Pirates of the Carribbean attack

Anti-virus vendor Sophos has reported a new downloader Trojan that is presented as a convincing email offer of free tickets and a trailer for the movie Pirates of the Carribbean 3.

Clicking on a link that supposedly plays the trailer runs the Trojan, resulting in an "unsupported codec" error message. In the background the Trojan attempts to disable anti-virus and then downloads additional components. The nature of these may change, but so far they appear to perform credentials theft, remote control and zombie functions. This Trojan is exceptionally well presented and convincing, including high quality text and the official movie logo, and is clearly aimed at children.

Graham Cluley of Sophos told heise Security that he views this Trojan as a good example of both the general raising of presentational standards and the increasing use of blended threats, which together make such malware an ever greater threat: "Computer users who don't take care about what they run on their PC, and believe every email they are sent, could be heading for stormy water".