YouTube hit by porn and malware scams
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Security, Google, Internet on
The week started off OK for YouTube, with the news that it was now seeing a rather impressive 20 hours worth of video clips being uploaded to the site every minute of every day. It did not take long for the week to go pear-shaped, however. First with the 4Chan Porn Bombing episode which saw hundreds of video clips purporting to be family friendly kid’s clips actually containing hardcore pornography content. The sickos behind this stunt, who have been boasting of their exploits in various online forums, seem to think it amusing to expose kids to sexually explicit material and have justified the action by claiming it was done to expose how easy uploading porn to YouTube is. I have said it elsewhere, and I will say it here. Dumbass. Sick, twisted and moronic dumbass in fact.
Just as the powers that be at Google must have thought the week could get no worse, and with a weekend coming up as well, PandaLabs has today revealed that it has discovered nearly 5000 videos on YouTube which contain comments that link to malicious web pages. OK, so it isn’t quite in the same league as the dumbass YouTube Porn revelation, but I feel sure that Google could have done without it, nonetheless. Let’s face it, using comments on a web 2.0 site to try and herd users towards malware sites is nothing new. Digg and Facebook have seen it, Twitter has seen it, and I feel pretty sure that YouTube has seen it in the past as well. So what is different this time? Well, that number for one thing. PandaLabs tells me it has detected 4900 videos in all, so far, with malicious links in the comment fields. Using the usual manipulation logic of the malware merchant, these comments suggest the link will take the user to a site hosting porn videos, and no I do not mean YouTube itself despite that earlier news story. The sting is the old ‘download a file to view the video’ one, in this case, or in 4900 cases should I say, everyone gets a copy of a fake antivirus solution called PrivacyCenter which does a fake scan and then offers a premium version at cost to clean up the infected system. A typical scareware scam in other words. What does not seem typical, at least for a YouTube scam, is the execution of the commenting.
“The technique of using malicious comments on YouTube is not new in itself. What is alarming however, is the quantity of links we have detected pointing to the same Web page. This suggests that cyber-criminals are using automated tools to publish these comments” Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs says.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Comment by - October 27, 2009 on 10:23 am
Cool post.. Its true that YouTube is hit by porn and malware scams.. Youtube is only the site where i see any type of videos..
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