Osama bin-Laden video footage proves infectious

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 5 Nov 2004 at 13:34

An Internet worm, purporting to offer video footage of a speech by Osama bin-Laden, has been discovered infecting Net-connected computers.

The Famus-F worm appears to be using the re-election of George Bush to play on the world's curiosity as to how this will be received by targets of his 'War on terror'.

The worm arrives as a bilingual English and Spanish email, with the subject line 'More terrorism this year'., and message body: 'Last speech from Bin Laden. Please forwards this video to everybody.' It includes the password - 'cnn'.

The file attached is of course no video, but rather the worm in question, and if opened will copy a number of files locally and scour the infected system for email addresses to which it can forward itself.

'Hackers and virus writers will try all kinds of topical tricks to entice people into running their malicious code,' said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. 'It seems this time that the virus writer has focused on the public's appetite for breaking news on the war against terror.'

Fortunately, the worm has as yet to gain any momentum in infection rates, but Sophos warns to be on the lookout for such a worm and to update antivirus software.