One our researchers was reading the comments about Dancing With The Stars, and Kate Gosselin’s performance (He’s a huge fan … don’t ask), when he noticed a link to a URL shortening service. Given that it was advertising a video of Kate Gosselin topless, he astutely realised that was a bit suspicious, and checked it out inside a nice, safe virtual pc. Indeed, the shortening service immediately transferred to a website showing a picture of Kate at the beach…
Note the dialog that says “ActiveX Object Error”, and “Click OK to download”. If you’re a poker player, this is what’s known as a “tell”. And if you are not a poker player, this is your sign that you should run for the hills, or in computer terms, start Task Manager and kill the browser.
If you _ever_ have to download a codec or anything to watch a video …. DON”T!
If, however, you are determined to walk a little on the wild side, and try to view Ms Gosselin, you are confronted with a File Download diloag, and when you run that, you see this screen …
Wait … an anti virus? I thought I was getting a movie viewer!?
Of course, your machine is now officially nailed, and no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the folks who wrote the rogue anti virus, and these things are really painful to remove.
The upside for Kate is that she is now being used as a Lure by the Fake Codec-ers, which makes her officially a celebrity.
None-the-less, Dancing With The Stars will no doubt continue, and it’s now Jon and Kate Plus Eight Plus Fake Codecs… oh, minus Jon. 🙂