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new mp3 eating trojan
did a search and couldnt find anything
supposedly a new trojan that will go in your computer and delete all your mp3s. it is supposed to affect windows users.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...ing-trojan.html
this would suck, especially if you ripped your mp3s from cds or purchased them online.
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Average PC is a smorgasboard for a new MP3-eating trojan
By Jacqui Cheng | Published: August 03, 2007 - 02:05PM CT
It's no secret that people like to collect music on their PCs, with music files taking up more and more hard drive space as time goes on. Recent data from Comscore says that as of April of this year the typical computer in the US contains an average of 880 MP3 files, taking up roughly 3GB of hard drive space. Compared to the average number of Word documents (197), PDFs (100), and Excel files (77), music files make up the single most common type of file found on an average computer by a long shot.
But that very hobby could bite an avid MP3 collector in the butt if a new worm makes its way into their computers. A newly-uncovered worm called W32.Deletemusic does exactly what its name implies—it goes through a PC and deletes all MP3 files in sight. And that's it. Simultaneously low-threat and highly annoying, the worm makes its way from computer to computer by spreading itself onto all attached drives of a given PC, including flash drives and removable media. If that media is then removed and inserted into another computer, it continues its music-eating rampage on the new host.
This isn't the first time such a worm has gone after MP3 files. Nopir-B made its rounds some two years ago and posed as DVD copying software, according to security firm Sophos. When users tried to run it, Nopir-B scolded them for participating in piracy and proceeded to delete all MP3s from their computers. Similarly, last year's Erazer trojan deleted not only MP3 files, but AVIs, MPEGs, WMVs, and ZIP files as well in a "crusade" against piracy.
Of course, these worms don't take into account the fact that many MP3 files may not be pirated at all—they could be legitimate downloads, ripped from CDs, or even recorded by users themselves. And while losing an entire music collection that you've dedicated so much time into ripping, labeling, and organizing can be devastating, there is no real payload for the worm's efforts. Such foresight isn't exactly the forte of these trojan-writers, according to Sophos' Graham Cluley. "The authors of this worm are more likely to be teenage mischief makers than the organized criminal gangs we typically see authoring financially-motivated malware these days," he said in a statement seen by IDG News Service.
A quick poll among the Ars Technica staff shows that not only do we all have a disproportionate number of MP3 files compared to the national average, some of us would be quite a bit more inconvenienced than others if we were to get bitten by the W32.Deletemusic bug. The number of music files on our computers ranged from the low end of 1,400 all the way up to a staggering 35,000, and we're sure that some of our readers could probably give those numbers a run for their money. And that's why Cluley advises that users should turn off any autorun functionalities on their computers to prevent the worm from spreading.
W32.Deletemusic affects computers running Windows 2000/95/98/Me/NT/Server 2003/Vista/XP.
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