One thing is even worse than online pornography when it comes to your PC's safety and security.
The bogus messages include links to what are purported to be the day's top 10 news stories and top 10 video clips. Click on any of them and it will bring up a dialog box that says an incorrect version of Flash Player has been detected. The user is then instructed to download an update. Then it gets frustrating. Sam Masiello, vice president of information security at the security company MX Logic Inc., told Computerworld reporter Gregg Keizer that the attack then goes into an endless loop. Clicking "cancel" in the dialog box causes another pop-up to appear, but clicking "cancel" there returns the user to the first dialog. This just keeps happening over and over. "It puts you in this perpetual loop, so your only options are to kill your browser [session] or be browbeaten into installing it," Masiello explained to Computerworld. If that happens, kill the browser session!
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Adobe Systems Inc., the maker of Flash Player, said it's aware of the malware posing as its software and warns users to ignore any update requests that don't originate from Adobe's own servers. "Do not download Flash Player from a site other than Adobe.com," David Lenoe, the company's product security program manager, said in an entry on Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team's PSIRT blog. "This goes for any piece of software (Reader, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, etc.) -- if you get a notice to update, it's not a bad idea to go directly to the site of the software vendor and download the update directly from the source. If the download is from an unfamiliar URL or an IP address, you should be suspicious."
If you want to keep your job, never ever send one of these seven e-mail messages from work.
So what happens if you download the bogus Flash Player? Computerworld says it installs a Trojan horse that can be identified by multiple names, including Cbeplay.a, that in turn "phones home" to a malicious server to grab and install additional malware.
