#103 - Viruses turn Media Player's anti-piracy feature against honest users.

Be careful next time you use Windows Media Player. Viruses attached to some video files can turn the program's anti-piracy feature into a tool for hackers to install large amounts of spyware, adware and other such pests on the user's hard drive. The viruses are activated when honest user attempt to download the license required to legally view the infected file.

Hackers are turning digital rights management features of Microsoft's Windows Media Player against users by fooling them into downloading massive amounts of spyware, adware, and viruses.

According to anti-virus vendor Panda Software, two new Trojan horses -- dubbed WmvDownloader.a and WmvDownloader.b -- have been planted in video files seeded to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like eMule and KaZaA.

The Trojans take advantage of the new anti-piracy features in Windows Media Player 10 and Windows XP SP2 to trick users, said Panda.

When a user tries to play a protected Windows media file, the anti-piracy technology demands a valid license; if that license is not stored locally, the player looks for it on the Internet so the user can download or purchase it.

However, these Trojans only "pretend to download the corresponding license from certain Web pages," said Panda in its online alert.

"What they actually do is redirect the user to other Internet addresses from which they download a large number of adware, spyware, dialers, and other viruses."

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