Harry Potter & Computer Worm

With just weeks remaining until the release of the last ever Harry Potter novel, and the imminent premiere of the fifth movie in the franchise, Sophos has warned of a new computer worm exploiting Potter-mania around the world.

The W32/Hairy-A worm can automatically infect a PC when users plug-in USB drives, which carry a file posing as a copy of the eagerly anticipated novel, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". If the users have allowed USB drives to 'auto-run' they will see a file called “HarryPotter-TheDeathlyHollows”. Inside this Word document file, there is a simple phrase “Harry Potter is dead”. Then the worm look for other removable drive to infect.

After infecting Windows computers, the worm creates a number of new users - namely the main characters from JK Rowling's celebrated series of books about student wizards: Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.

After logging in, users are shown the following message via a batch file:

In addition, everytime infected users open Internet Explorer they will find their start page has been redirected to an Amazon.com web page selling a spoof book entitled "Harry Putter and the Chamber of Cheesecakes".

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Sophos