Harry Potter worm infects PCs

posted onJune 30, 2007
by hitbsecnews

A NASTY computer worm is taking advantage of the worldwide Harry Potter mania to infect PCs around the globe.

With the release of the last ever Potter book and the premiere of the fifth movie in the franchise, the W32/Hairy-A worm is disguising itself as a copy of the eagerly-anticipated novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which releases worldwide on July 21.

Once in the user's system, the worm copies itself onto attached USB memory drives so it can spread to any other PCs it is connected to.

A file called "HarryPotter-TheDeathlyHallows.doc" can be found on infected PCs and once opened the only words inside are: Harry Potter is dead.

Source

Tags

Viruses & Malware

You May Also Like

Other Articles In This Section

Recent News

Friday, November 29th

North Korean hackers posing as IT workers steal over $1B in cyberattack
OpenAI is at war with its own Sora video testers following brief public leak
Found on VirusTotal: The world’s first UEFI bootkit for Linux

Tuesday, November 19th

CISA Director Jen Easterly, in Place Since 2021, to Step Down
Korea extradites Russian, Vietnamese suspects linked to $16M ransomware scheme
WhatsApp: NSO Group Operates Pegasus Spyware for Customers

Friday, November 8th

North Korean hackers target cryptocurrency with malware
Man sick of crashes sues Intel for allegedly hiding CPU defects
Law enforcement operation takes down 22,000 malicious IP addresses worldwide

Friday, November 1st

Youth of today say passwords are old news, passkeys are the future
Chinese attackers accessed Canadian government networks – for five years
OpenAI launches ChatGPT with Search, taking Google head-on
Here’s the paper no one read before declaring the demise of modern cryptography
Not just ChatGPT anymore: Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude get desktop apps

Tuesday, July 9th

China's APT40 gang is ready to attack vulns within hours or days of public release
AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream
The president ordered a board to probe a massive Russian cyberattack. It never did.
Massive car dealer ransom attack is mostly over after 2 weeks of work-arounds

Wednesday, July 3rd

“RegreSSHion” vulnerability in OpenSSH gives attackers root on Linux
Two of the German military’s new spy satellites appear to have failed in orbit

Friday, June 28th

Indonesian Airports, Data Centres Hit By Worst Cyberattack in Years
Cisco Talos warns of wider security implications following Snowflake breach

Thursday, June 27th

I Wore Meta Ray-Bans in Montreal to Test Their AI Translation Skills. It Did Not Go Well
Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs
YouTube tries convincing record labels to license music for AI song generator
Critical MOVEit vulnerability puts huge swaths of the Internet at severe risk
Julian Assange to plead guilty but is going home after long extradition fight

Thursday, June 13th

Hackers show off jailbroken checkm8-vulnerable iPad and Apple TV running iPadOS 18 & tvOS 18 respectively
One of the major sellers of detailed driver behavioral data is shutting down
Turkish student creates custom AI device for cheating university exam, gets arrested

Wednesday, June 12th

Chinese-Made Biometric Access System Has 24 Vulnerabilities
Apple and OpenAI currently have the most misunderstood partnership in tech
Adobe to update vague AI terms after users threaten to cancel subscriptions
China state hackers infected 20,000 Fortinet VPNs

Tuesday, June 11th

Russia Is Targeting Germany With Fake Information as Europe Votes