Beware of clicking on videos supposedly about Palin's daughter

[moriah]

.... it looks like one site has already decided to start doing worse than RickRolling.

http://skylane20.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/bart-motes-palin-baby-shocker-video/

If you click on that link, it takes you to some weird website in China that looks like YouTube but is not, that wants you to "update your ActiveX" and run setup.exe. I am willing to bet money that it is a virus site.

Just figured since everyone is so ... well ... curious... that it'd be better to warn people. And if anyone actually wants to try to run the thing on a machine that they don't care if it gets infested with some horrible nasty, go ahead and see if the video is anything interesting.

[Bucky]

1. Thank you for posting this link. I'll go check it out now

Oh noes! :wow:

[moriah]

6. *giggle* Youre silly... :)

Well, what can I say.... I managed to get infected with my first worm/virus/trojan/hijacker this week -- the first time in 16 years of having a computer with a modem and calling BBSes/getting online.

While Rickrolls are funny (even if they get a bit old, I really liked the ObamaRoll tho), trying to infect a computer with malware or virii isn't.

[bbgrunt]

2. thanks for the warning. I don't click on a lot of links that

people post here without explanation for that very reason.

[girl gone mad]

3. My firewall blocked a few sites..

related to "Babygate" yesterday. I did some investigating on a piece of junk laptop I have and found that they were pushing the malware known as "antivirus xp 2008". It's particularly insidious and can be very difficult to get rid of.

Right wing groups are behind a lot of this garbage and it looks like they are currently engaging in illegal, malicious activity. I think they are out to disable computers of liberal posters to try to control the message on Palin. If you read their blogs, their entire strategy on Palin involved making as good of a first impression as possible and defining her in the mainstream before we had a chance (more proof that she wasn't vetted).

Thank you for bringing this up. I hope more people will get the message.

[moriah]

7. Exactly... Rickrolling is funny, spreading malware is illegal.

Even if I think the BabyGate issue is way too farfetched and sounds like something out of a VC Andrews novel, it's not a reason to deliberately harm someone else's computer.

If you want to get rid of any latent infection on your junk laptop from exploration on that, the thing that I used to remove the malware that was similar to that (I never actually *installed* the Antivirus XP 2008 but I had gotten something on the computer that was trying to make me install it, there was a rootkit program involved) was Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Removal Tool, from malwarebytes.org.

It was what the forums on Symantec and on my AV software's page recommended (I use F-Prot by Frisk in Iceland, and they are trying to see if I am willing to reinfect myself to send them the infected files to analyze for new signatures so they can block it -- I'm not sure if I really want to.)

[girl gone mad]

13. I forwarded..

the links to LE, as well as the posts that linked to them.

People should be aware of what "babygate" really was and be more careful not to take the bait next time.

[appleannie1]

4. Clicked on one yesterday and Norton immediately blocked it.

It was not the same site you reported. What Norton said was "an attack on your computor was blocked"

[Quixote1818]

5. My computer stopped the video from playing

It said it was an "attack site" and had spy-whare in it for tracking.

[Towlie]

8. I checked it out with my Ubuntu computer...

There's now a warning in the pseudo-YouTube window that warns of an "Attack Site".

[Connonym]

9. I was looking at Google news this morning to see if story was on there

on the 2nd page of links there was an article from a newspaper in Alaska about the alleged controversy. I read the article (about 5 paragraphs long) and then went back to the Google links to find that the article was no longer linked on Google news -- at least not in the first 10 pages of links that I looked at. Now I suppose it's possible that the link got pushed down the list but it seemed pretty strange that it would go down that far in 5 minutes. I didn't have the time to scan all 3000+ news links to see if it was still being linked at all but it sure made me think that they moved that link.

[moriah]

12. Now that's kinda freaky.

I don't like the idea of smothering the media.

If you do a websearch on "Bristol Palin" though, it appears someone decided to put up a Wikipedia entry on her specifically, that page is now dead and the cache doesn't work of it in Google Search, but you can still see the entry had been made.

Weird.

[Metric System]

10. Shouldn't this link not be active since it leads to a bad site?

[moriah]

11. I'll be honest here, and if you want me to I will be happy to update the link so...

... no one can click on it but would have to cut and paste it into their browser...

But if anyone decided to click on it after I said "beware" in the subject and specifically said I thought it was a harmful site, they at least were fully aware of the status of the site. I would laugh at anyone who complained that they decided to click on it anyway and then got upset they got virus-infested.

But that's just me.