24 October 2007 01:26 GMT
No! Not my precious MP3's!
How would you like it if one day you ran a seemingly innocent file and every single MP3, WAV, AVI and MPG file on your harddisk died?
That’s what could happen if you were to be infected with Troj/MediaDel-A. It's a small VisualBasic script that replaces all of the aforesaid media files on your system with the following text message:
“you should not steal our hard work. thanks for understanding why we did this. RIAA/MPAA.”
Now, it's almost certain that the RIAA and MPAA are not stupid enough to distribute malware that would trash people's media files indiscriminately. It's more likely the work of a lone anti-piracy advocate or a script-kiddie looking to avoid blame, regardless its one nasty trick.
Fortunately this malware is not widely spread and we here at Sophos plan to keep it that way.
Chris Mitchell, SophosLabs Australia.
