A new version of the “Windows only” Trojan horse that last week proclaimed that Bin Laden had committed suicide is now luring hapless victims to run it by promising the suicide photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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.

If Arnie had offed himself, you’d here about it on the news within minutes or hours, so toss these things where they belong, into the trash.

regards

Franki

This article was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2004 at 2:45 am