F-Secure warns of bogus McAfee email

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 14 Dec 2005 at 16:38

Finnish security company F-Secure said yesterday it had received numerous reports of an email in circulation that appeared to be from McAfee, which instructed recipients to download a bogus update which was in fact a virus.

The email contained a link to a webpage that appeared to be associated with McAfee and requested the download of a file in order to protect against an invented virus called Kongo31.XRW. However, the download was in fact the trojan virus Hanlo.h.

McAfee says it issued updates to its users as soon as it became aware of the attack in order to protect its customers and put up a page warning of the campaign.

It said that the fake site has since been taken down and that the email campaign no longer presents a threat to its users.