Vincent Arnold

Hackers are attempting to exploit Potter-mania with the release of a worm that attempts to infect USB memory drives.

The Hairy-A worm poses as a file containing a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the eagerly-anticipated final novel in the Harry Potter series, due out on 21 July.

The infected file normally comes on infected USB drives. If users plug these drives into their Windows PCs they are liable to infect their machines, especially if they have allowed USB drives to “auto-run”.

Infected drives contain a file called HarryPotter-TheDeathlyHallows.doc, a word document that contains nothing besides the phrase “Harry Potter is dead”, instead of the hoped-for transcript. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the worm begins casting its malign spell. The worm looks for other removable drives to infect before creating a number of new users (Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley) that will be familiar names to fans of the JK Rowling books.

Full Story and Source: Source: The Register

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 6:06 am and is filed under Attack Vector.