Posted on Tuesday, 2nd December 2008 by Roland_Melnick
UPDATE:
The virus alerts I received were apparent “false-positives” caused by a miscue with my anti-virus software, CA Anti-Virus. The issue has apparently been resolved with an update to the software. Don’t know if I should be glad my software is that sensitive…or ticked off at all the hassle it created. Sorry for any inconvenience. ~Roland
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Today, it came to my attention that a new virus outbreak has been associated with YouTube embedded videos. The virus is called “Actns/Swif.T” . Unfortunately, Badger Blogger has used several YouTube vids. After this discovery, I spent some time today removing many embedded You Tube videos. You should not have a problem if you just came to this blog, but if you were surfing before 2pm Central Time today, you may be infected.
This outbreak appears to have occurred in the last 24 hours. Another blogger, and this blogger too have noted the same problem and say this virus directs you to a sham “Antivirus 2009” website. Luckily, I can’t verify that at this time, so evaluate these sources yourself.
There is limited information available at this time, so I don’t know what are all the rammifications of this virus. Prudence dictates that our visitors run a virus scan regardless of whether or not you think you are infected.
All of the attempted attacks on my PC tried to save the infected file into this directory location:
C:\Documents and Settings\Roland Melnick\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5 It may do the same to yours.
BadgerBlogger submitted a list of apparently affected YouTube links to YouTube/Google security folks. We have not received a response from them at the time of this post.
Hopefully this has not inconvenienced any of you. To my fellow bloggers, I would recommend removing embedded YouTube videos until they resolve this issue. If you do have any questions or info regarding this virus, post it here…
Or feel free to email me: roland@badgerblogger.com . We will keep you updated as we learn more.
Posted in Home | Comments (9) |
9 Responses to “Note of Caution to BadgerBlogger Visitors”
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December 2nd, 2008 at 7:18 pm
This infection can be tricky.
I am more than willing to help anyone who nailed by this.
Just click on my name to email me.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Get a Mac and fear viruses no more!
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
According to an update on this blog post, it is a false positive being sent by certain AV software. It probably has to do with the embedded ads that are now contained in some YouTube videos. Details here.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Actually Matt, a mac can get a virus. Windows is still by far more popular then Macs so people tend to make Viruses for windows, but as the popularity of Macs increase the amount of viruses being made for them is also increasing.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Thanks for the info Nick…I hadn’t seen the “update” at Crunchgear.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:38 pm
What Ross said but a Mac is also way more secure. Hackers tend to write viruses for windoze because it’s way easier to attack. OS-X and Linux don’t allow executable files to run rampant without root privileges.
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:31 am
All you mac users who have been lulled into your false sense of security read this. Mac is no WAY MORE SECURE. Offer up 10k and 2 minutes and see what happens to the MAC OS.
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/03/28/os-x-first-os-to-be-hacked-in-pwn-2-own-contest/
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:21 am
@TerryN
You can get the same level of security with Windows if you wish. Unfortunately, the way Windows is generally isntalled, this is not the default. What I do is to create two accounts. I create an Admin account (equivolent to a root account) which I rarely log into, and then a second account on the same machine which is a normal user account.
For 95% of my time, I only ever log into the user account, and do the majority of my work there. I only use the admin account for installing software and other administrative work.
In fact, with Vista, if I try to install something from my user account, it prompts me to login as the admin account right there, which is exactly the behavior you get under Linux when you run an application using su.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 am
Nick – good plan. Windoze has grown up in security and runs damn near everything. I run a dual boot laptop with XP and RedHat. I also have a shared partition so I can move files back and forth. (Be careful about hibernation and shared partitions;-)
I get frustrated running XP because the (self imposed) virus scan/firewall overhead cuts performance.