A recent article tells of a crafty new worm making it’s way around the Internet by fooling unsuspecting users. This worm hides as an .asf media file. Once the machine is infected, it becomes a proxy which can be used for malicious purposes.

In order to propagate itself this worm will transcode any .mp3 files into infected .asf files. These files will attempt to load a new codec which will infect any machines that attempt to play the file.

This is a worm designed to directly target users who share music files via Peer-to-Peer file sharing networks. Once a user downloads the file they will be prompted to download a new codec, when in fact the new codec will be malicious code.

Network and security administrators are advised to insure that users are blocked from accessing Peer-to-Peer file sharing networks as this threat represents the latest in a long history of infections that have targeted Peer-to-Peer file sharing networks.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Bots, Online Safety, P2P, Security Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.