Online video is used to spread malicious code

When traditional forms of malicious code are becoming less effective, hackers are forced to seek new forms of distribution. One of them is to embed malicious code into online videos.

That is the conclusion presented in the recent Internet threat report published at a conference organized by the Georgia Information Security Technology Center. The conference brought together more than 300 scholars and security industry experts to discuss new Internet threats and prevention solutions.

The most discussed topic is the trend of changing the way of spreading malicious code of hackers. Now they can completely secretly install malicious code or secretly kidnap remote control PC users on the Internet.

Mr. Chris Rouland - Director of Information Technology Division of IBM Internet Security System - said businesses are increasingly equipped with better anti-spam tools, meaning the form of spreading malicious code through The email will also be highly effective and force hackers to find new ways to distribute it.

In the past few years, hackers have begun to turn to image spam, PDF files and many other forms . ' That's why I think the next step is that they will move to the field. attacking multimedia files, 'said Rouland.

Recently, there have been some cases of spreading malicious code via multimedia files.

In November 2006, the world security industry discovered a computer worm that could automatically launch a web browser to display a broken website when the user ran a multimedia file. This is followed by the emergence of a dangerous spyware that infects a PC when a user allows opening a video file. Besides, there were some hackers who began to fake links to YouTube videos to distribute malicious code.

This shows that PC users are still not equipped with enough security knowledge to resist the most common forms of attacks. ' PC users are advised and accustomed to not clicking on any links on emails sent from banks. But they all want to watch videos on YouTube. That's why the possibility of being infected with malicious code is still very high , 'said Rouland.

A new form of malicious distribution is also becoming more and more popular as a form of distribution via social networking websites, blogs or wikis. This is completely understandable when these types of websites have become a strong development trend with the number of indispensable users. Of course, hackers could hardly ignore this 'prey'.

When users browse the web they only see the content of the content displayed on the screen, but rarely know that the web application is operating in the background. Hackers took advantage of this method to infect malicious code on PC. Users access the website without knowing the malicious code has attacked their PC.

Hoang Dung