Mail with Beckham pics carries Trojan

October 15, 2004

Your curiosity may prove harmful to your PC. Virus writers have moved on from using Osama bin Laden's or Arnold Schwarzenegger's supposed suicides as a lure to trying a similar trick involving "compromising pictures" of football superstar David Beckham.

Unsuspecting Internet users could get more than they bargained for when trying to click on a site claiming to contain photographs of David Beckham caught in a compromising position, according to anti-virus firm Sophos.

According to Sophos, thousands of messages have been posted to Internet message boards in the past week claiming the married soccer star has been photographed with a Spanish prostitute.

A typical message reads: "David Beckham of Real Madrid was caught by photographers with his pants down. Early in the morning he was photographed with a Spanish hooker in a rather compromising position. Photos yet to hit the newspapers have been released here."

In reality this file offers only the Hackarmy Trojan. Beginning in July virus writers used the same trick to try to con users into believing the same Trojan was either a suicide note from Arnold Schwarzenegger, photographs depicting Osama Bin Laden's supposed untimely demise or "footage" of slain American hostage Nick Berg, who was beheaded by Iraqi insurgents in May.

The message instructs the curious to click on a Web link to see the revealing snapshots. But clicking the link will download a program known as the Hackarmy Trojan that opens a backdoor on a computer so that it can be controlled remotely by hackers. After installing itself on the victim's PC, it then tries to recruit PCs into so-called "bot networks" that are often used to distribute spam mail messages or to launch attacks across the web.

Hackers have chosen the right theme, considering footballer's latest scuffles on the family front with the state of the Beckham's marriage to his highly talented singer wife Victoria.

"Hackers and virus writers will try all kinds of tricks to entice people into downloading their malicious code - now they are trying to suggest that England's football captain David Beckham has been playing away from home," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "The public's appetite for salacious gossip about the private life of the Beckhams might lead some into an unpleasant computer infection."

Online folks should be constantly aware of the perils associated with opening unknown attachments within email messages targeting large audiences of unrelated people.

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