I offer you this article for your education.
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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