McAfee has warned users that they may get an ad instead of a music or video file on several file-sharing sites which is the most significant malware outbreak in three years.
Instead of playing an adult video, the Lion King in Portuguese, or the Girls Aloud theme from the St Trinnians soundtrack, for example, hundreds of rigged MP3 and MPEG files on the services trigger the download of an executable that serves ad to the infected computer.
Till now McAfee Avert Labs has reported more than 500,000 detections of a Trojan horse masquerading as a media file on services like Limewire and eDonkey.
Craig Schmugar, threat researcher at McAfee Avert Labs, explained that if people agree to download and run the executable they are asked to agree to a phony end user license agreement and some other useless software.
According to him:
In the end you’re left with a fake MP3 file taking up space, a worthless MP3 player, adware that claims not only to not display popups, but also to block them, and more adware that successfully displays popup and popunder ads.
McAfee has given “medium” rating to the threat, the highest rating given to any malware since 2005.
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