New Email Virus Attacks News Junkies

A new virus started showing up in people’s inboxes three days ago that attempts to trick people into opening an attachment that appears to be a video clip related to a news story.

The virus is called Trojan.Peacomm and it arrives in your inbox with a subject line that resembles a news story. The subject lines are changing constantly, but some of the ones I have seen in the past few days include:

• The Supreme Court has been attacked by terrorists. Sen. Mark Dayton dead!
• A killer at 11, he’s free at 21 and kill again!
• U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel
• British Muslims Genocide
• Naked teens attack home director
• 230 dead as storm batters Europe
• Re: Your text

While the subject lines of the email message change constantly, the names used for the attachments seem to be fairly consistent. The names used include:

• FullVideo.exe
• Full Story.exe
• Video.exe
• Read More.exe
• FullClip.exe

As of the 19th, Symantec’s Norton Antivirus has been detecting this virus, but if you accidentally double clicked on one of these attachments to view what you thought was a video, you may be unintentionally spreading this virus to the people on your email contact list.

To protect yourself from this and other viruses, I recommend you immediately update your antivirus software and run a complete system scan. Many of these attachments would have been stripped away before they reached Outlook and Outlook Express users, but users of other email programs could be at a greater risk of infection by this virus.