A new “Windows only” Trojan horse is luring hapless victims to run it by promising “suicide photographs” of the suicide of Osama bin Laden.
The Usenet newsgroups postings contains a link to a website promising the photographs, and directs them to download a file that is instead the Hackarmy Trojan horse. The purpose of this program is to give control of your Windows PC’s to the crackers who can use it for any purpose they choose, including selling it to spammers to be used as a spam relay, or to attack any company they choose with all the other captured PC’s.
As a general rule, you should treat files you get from an unknown source online the same as you’d trust food given to you by shady sorts in a back alley. In other words not at all, always throw it away. As usual, this Trojan only affects Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003, Linux and Macintosh are totally unaffected.
For information and removal instructions, see Sophos Hackarmy.
While there are undoubtably millions of people out there that would be ecstatic if Osama offed himself. I can’t see it happening any time soon, and if it were to happen, it would most likely be by walking into a public place strapped to a bomb. I can’t see that being all that likely either as he seems to prefer to use his minions for all the “one way” missions.
regards
Franki
