Bizarre Virus Threatens to Kill File-Sharers

Written by enigmax on March 01, 2007

A strange virus which taunts file-sharers and threatens to report them to the police and even kill them, is being distributed on the Winny network.

winny virus kills The virus has two variants Troj/Pirlames-A and Troj/Pirlames-B, masquerades as a screensaver and attacks files with these popular extensions - EXE, BAT, CMD, INI, ASP, HTM, HTML, PHP, CLASS, JAVA, DBX, EML, MBX, TBB, WAB, HLP, TXT, MP3, XLS, LOG, BMP - overwriting them with images of comic book character Ayu Tsukimiya.

It’s reported that one of the images, which includes a song about fish-shaped pancakes stuffed with jam, has a telephone number included although it’s unclear to whom the number belongs.

Another exclaims “This is a visit from the prevalent Piro virus! Stop P2P! If you don’t i’ll tell the police!” while another threatens “Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 seconds, i’m going to kill you!”

Graham Cluley, a consultant for Sophos said of the virus “This is one of the most bizarre pieces of malware we have seen in our labs for quite some time, but it’s data-destroying payload is no laughing matter. It acts as a timely reminder to companies that they may want to control users’ access to P2P file-sharing software not just because they can eat up bandwidth, but also because they can present a security risk to your corporate data.”

Winny is the most popular P2P application in Japan. In 2006 the developer of the Winny file-sharing software was found guilty and fined 1.5 million yen for assisting users in copyright violations.

If you don't like torrents try MP3 Fiesta. They hold nearly 67,000 albums from nearly 17,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.10 mark for single tracks with full albums coming in at roughly $1.00. Tracks are available from 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal

Saved in: DRM and Other Evil, P2P and Filesharing
Tags: p2p, virus, winny

Previously: MPAA: We Were Only Testing Forest Blog

Next: TV Wars: BitTorrent to the Rescue

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33 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)

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26 Dec 22, 2007 at 16:46 by NaN

I’m disappointed in you all. Only one of the comments I’ve read has anything to do with Kanon.

27 Dec 23, 2007 at 05:17 by oneplusone

[quote comment="244874"][quote comment="56852"]My god, does people use Windows? That’s so wierd. It’s like, hello, i’m retarded. I’ve been using OSX since 1989 - not a single virus etc!

Windows is so stupid![/quote]

OSX wasn’t in use in 1989, you lack-witted macluebie. It was first released in a client configuration in 2001.

So much for Windows being ’stupid’. You’re so fucking dumb you don’t realise that viruses will always be written for the most popular operating systems, not the hobbyist OSes..

I just love it when know-nothing lusers try to be ‘net-kewl’ & just end up embarassing themselves in front of tens of thousands of people. What a fucking moron!

LOLlerskates![/quote]

ROTFL
I was scrolling down reading waiting for someone to call him on that.

28 Jan 25, 2008 at 04:07 by Bill Cosplay

Thats why I use windows xp pro x64. virus’s just kinda wig out in it.(core files are 64bit and some are in different locations.)

that and a hardware firewall kinda helps. And not randomly clicking Pr0n links, that helps too.

29 Mar 02, 2008 at 09:41 by egasimus