Leighton Meester sex video lure spreads Mac and Windows malware to Twitter users

Here's an unusual cocktail: Internet celeb and former Apple Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki, a sex video of Leighton Meester (the star of hit TV show "Gossip Girl"), a sprinkle of Twitter, and a shot of web-based malware.

My suspicions were raised when I saw that Guy Kawasaki has posted a message saying

Leighton Meester sex tape video free download!

on his Twitter account.

Sure enough, following the link hops you between a series of websites, offering to show you a sex video of the young Hollywood actress.

As we've seen in other attacks in the past, agreeing to download the codec to view the sex video is not a good idea. The webpage can tell if you are visiting the site using an Apple Mac or a Windows computer, and will serve up the relevant piece of malware. In the case of Macs the malware is detected by Sophos as OSX/Jahlav-C.

The fact that the post was published on Guy Kawasaki's Twitter account (which has almost 140,000 followers) is particularly worrying. I wonder how many people might have thought it was worth the risk of clicking on the link, if there was a chance of watching a free Leighton Meester sex video.

It's only a couple of weeks since we reported on other instances of hackers spreading the Jahlav-C Trojan horse via an X-rated lure to Mac users. The worry is that many Mac users are not running any anti-virus protection - something maybe they need to reconsider.

After all, if you really want to watch a sexy video of a celebrity chances are that you probably will be prepared to enter your system password to allow a video codec plugin to install.