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Real Media Files Owned By Virus
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-11-15
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
McAfee's Avert Labs has discovered a virus in the wild, W32/Realor.worm, that goes around modifying all of the Real Media files it encounters.
Geok Meng Ong discussed several worms affecting media players on the latest entry to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. One stood out for its behavior - W32/Realor.worm, a virus that delivers malicious web pages to a Real Player user.
The threat should make it clearer to people that files from unknown senders, or unexpected files from known senders, could pose problems for one's system. The popularity of online video has captivated millions of computer users, and that could lead to problems when something like Realor comes along:
These "infected" media files launch a malicious webpage without prompting, as they are being viewed by the user in Real media player. These files can be music or videos hosted on a network drive containing corporate presentations, a personal media server, or a P2P shared folder et cetera.
"When was the last time you hesitated when opening a movie file," the researcher asked. It's a pretty good question, since threats over video have not been hugely prevalent even as video popularity soared.
Imagine the chaos that could erupt for a company like Microsoft. Even though its new Zune player did not debut with video sharing, that is a feature they want to add later. A viral video, and by viral I mean malicious and not popular, could turn a bunch of $250 Zunes into very pricey paperweights.
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Tag: Real Media
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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