Trojan authors take advantage of Michael Moore

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 17 September 2009 07:29

Your IT - Home IT

Trojaned files which claim to be copies of the latest film made by American documentary film maker Michael Moore have flooded torrent sites over the last few days, reliable sources say.
The film, Capitalism: A love story, was shown at the recent Venice Film Festival, and is to be released in New York and Los Angeles on September 22 and in other parts of the US on October 2.

Windows users who download such files will end up installing malware on their systems, these sources say.

Users of other operating systems will not be affected but the downloads are of no use to them either.

Sources say that while the copies appear to be the same size as a regular copy would be, they are not playable beyond a few seconds.

Apparently, a message similar to "Codec error: use Windows Media Player" appears as soon as the digitised file starts playing, no matter what application one uses to try and play it.

The file then stops playing, and redirects the user to a website, asking the user to download what is described as a media player that can play hi-res files.

But, sources say, in order to download this media player, one first has to download what appears to be adware. In one case, the adware bore the name Zango.

After this, the media player, which is none other than the latest version of the well-known VLC, gets downloaded and installed.

But it cannot play the media file which has been downloaded; sources say that the same message appears when the file is loaded in VLC.