Rihanna and Kelly Clarkson video emails spread a trojan horse

Sophos is warning internet users about the latest disguise being used by malware authors in their attempt to infect people’s PCs – an email claiming to point to music videos of popstars like Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson and Rihanna.

Sophos has proactively protected customers against the latest wave of malicious emails, which purport to be links to new music videos of an assortment of popstars, and include subject lines such as ‘awesome new video’ and ‘cool video is out’.

Musical artists referred to in the emails include Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, Rihanna, The Eagles, Foo Fighters, R. Kelly, and Velvet Revolver.

Sophos experts note that clicking on a link inside the email will send surfers to a webpage containing a malicious script and a Trojan horse designed to turn the user’s PC into a compromised zombie. If infected, hackers can use victims’ computers to steal personal information, spam out malware and junk email, or launch distributed denial of service attacks against innocent parties.

“Earlier this week hackers were pretending that their emails pointed to a YouTube video; before that they posed as Ecards or breaking news stories. What’s clear is that they will keep on adopting new disguises to try and infect the Windows computers of innocent internet surfers,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “Some may find the prospect of viewing the next Beyonce video irresistible. This is less of a technological problem, and more of a human problem. It may sound like a broken record, but people need to stop clicking on links in unsolicited emails or risk a computer virus infection.”