New Romanian Virus Speculates On Iraqi Crisis

[ovi]

A new virus is in the wild, European producer of antivirus BitDefender warned today. The virus, dubbed Antiman.A, speculates on a recent and tragic story involving the kidnapping of three Romanian journalists, abducted by a little-known terrorist Iraqi group approximately a month ago.

The subject line of the infected message is in Romanian and it varies from: "Voteaza azi!" ("Vote today"), "Antivirus," "Antimanele" ("Against Gypsy music"), to "Cum a murit Papa?" ("How did the Pope die?"). At the same time, the message body is also in Romanian, and among others, it calls for people to vote in a virtual poll concerning the withdrawal of Romanian troops from Iraq, or it pretends to be the latest version of an antivirus, which can solve "all your problems." Once executed, the malicious code erases each and all files which contain the names of well-known Gipsy music singers.

"The author of this piece of malware is most certainly a Romanian citizen, who has designed it in order to show his deep discontent with the ever increasing popularity of Gypsy music in Romania. Despite the fact that technically it is a very simple code, the virus is spreading at an amazing speed throughout Romania, due to the skilful social engineering tricks employed by its author," stated BitDefender CTO, Bogdan Dumitru.

Source: bitdefender.com

 

[Duke]

So keep your virus definitions up to date and be sure your virus software program is running when you open up your e-mail program.

 

[ovi]

Hello

Right, this is one of the things that everyone should do.

Regards,
Ovi

 

[Duke]

I can tell you that it's a hard thing to remember if your a gamer. Depending on virus software, you can have up to 3 or 4 background apps running for autoupdate, scheduler, etc., and they usually get shutdown in interest of better framerates and game performance. I know that I've been hit at least once by not restarting my resident shield just after gameplay.

The other exploit that seems to be getting a bit more dangerous is getting hacked while playing online. When connected to a server, your at risk simply because it's an open doorway from your system to the server. I know this was a problem with UT2k4 early on, I'm not sure if it was fixed but I think it may have been. You'll see these types of attacks only get more common as games are rushed to market before completion and patched as they hit the shelves or slightly after.