Dave Horvath
4 Aug 2007 11:44
In an obvious protest against pirating music, someone has unleashed a new, low threat trojan virus onto the Internet community that is hellbent on deleting all of your MP3 files. Known as the W32.Deletemusic, this virus does exactly as the name implies. Once activated, it will scan any drive connected to your PC and delete any music file, whether it be on your primary hard drive, flash drive, or external hard drive. Additionally, it'll attach itself to an infected drive and if that drive is inserted into another machine, it will again continue its destruction of all your music.
This isn't the first time some group has taken its aim on pirating. Over the past two years, there have been other trojans named Nopir-B and Erazer. The latter being the more vicious of the two as it wouldn't only target mp3s, but AVI, mpgs, wmvs and ZIP files.
While speculation can point this towards an RIAA cooked up trojan that thwarts would-be pirates, analysts claim that this type of thing appears to be the work of mischievous teenagers and not some larger entity.
W32.Deletemusic affects computers running Windows all the way back from Windows 95 to Windows Vista and everything in between.
Source:
ARS Technica