McAfee's Avert Labs has exposed a new virus in the wild, W32/Realor.worm that modifies all of the Real Media files it comes across.
Geok Meng Ong talked about quite a few worms targeting media players on the most recent post to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. One was prominent for its behavior - W32/Realor.worm, a virus that brings delivers web pages to a Real Player user.
The danger should make it clearer to people that files from unidentified senders, or surprising files from known senders, could spell danger for one's system. The fame of online video has fascinated millions of computer users, and that could lead to problems when something like Realor comes along:
These "infected" media files start a malicious webpage without asking, as they are being viewed by the customer in Real media player. These files can be music or videos hosted on a network drive containing company 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 investigator 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 blow up 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.
