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| The Erazer Trojan horse includes amongst its
targets music pirates. |
Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global
network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have
discovered a Trojan horse that seeks out and wipes movies and MP3
music tracks that it believed infected computers are illegally
distributing via file-sharing networks.
The Troj/Erazer-A Trojan
horse scours folders used for peer-to-peer file-sharing
peer-to-peer for AVI, MP3, MPEG, WMV, GIF, ZIP and other files. If
files are found by the Trojan it wipes them, and plants a copy of
itself in the folder using tempting names such as game.exe,
goporn.exe, nero7.exe and officexpcrack.exe.
"The Erazer Trojan is a vigilante worthy of a Charles Bronson
movie, taking the law into its own hands. However, it's perfectly
possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files
too," said Graham
Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "The Erazer
Trojan targets internet users it believes are involved in piracy,
but fails to discriminate between the true criminals and those who
may have MP3 music files or home movies that they have created
themselves. Malware is not the way to fight internet piracy."
Sophos experts note that the Erazer Trojan horse also attempts
to terminate a number of different security-related applications,
which may assist hackers in gaining access to a compromised
computer.
Sophos recommends companies put in place a consolidated solution to defend against viruses,
spyware and spam, and ensure that it is automatically updated as
new threats emerge.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.