Thursday, August 14, 2008

New Virus in town - Under the name of 'Flash Player Installer'

A friend today got infected with a spam email.
The email's content goes

From: MSNBC Breaking News
Date: Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:06 PM
Subject: msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: NASDAQ index gains 720 points overnight upon war announcement
To: **********@*****.com


msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: NASDAQ index gains 720 points overnight upon war announcement

Find out more at http://breakingnews.msnbc.com
======================================================
See the top news of the day at MSNBC.com, and the latest from Today Show and NBC Nightly News.

=========================================
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message was forwarded to you) simply go to
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email address receiving this message, and click the Go button.

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Naturally, he clicked on the link which read "http://breakingnews.msnbc.com" but was linking to a infected site. And was prompted to 'Install Flash player' . Now who doesn't want to install Flash player!!
So he "installed" clicking on the the link. At the time of me writing this, he is still figuring out how to clean up the mess!

There is only one way to make sure u won't fall for this trap. Always have the latest Flash player installed in your machine. ;)

If you haven't updated your flash player for long, go get it here.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah they use CNN and other major news outlets in the subject too.

FF 3.x actually blocks it - and yeah for Flash Player ALWAYS go to the source - Adobe Systems Inc. - FP10 is out soon too!

Emiliano CaƱete said...

Hi!
I'm Emiliano from Buenos Aires, Argentina .. I have a problem with this virus("Install.Flash.Player.exe"), i'm infected right now and i don't know how to remove it.
Do you know anything else about this virus?

Arul said...

@RamsesVII

Am not aware of the removal tools out there. A quick google search returned me this link - One of the answers lists a few things to do:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081113204911AAfa1yt

Good luck!