Talk about using pop-culture to your advantage. With the newest Harry Potter movie released as well as the eager anticipation for the last book to come out, hackers developed a piece of malware specifically for all the Harry Potter fans. Since Harry Potter is such a worldwide phenomenon, this is a serious threat. Just keep this in mind: if you receive an email titled ‘HarryPotter-TheDeathlyHallows.doc’, don’t open it.

A NASTY computer worm is taking advantage of the worldwide Harry Potter mania to infect PCs around the globe.

With the release of the last ever Potter book and the premiere of the fifth movie in the franchise, the W32/Hairy-A worm is disguising itself as a copy of the eagerly-anticipated novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which releases worldwide on July 21.

Once in the user’s system, the worm copies itself onto attached USB memory drives so it can spread to any other PCs it is connected to.

A file called ‘HarryPotter-TheDeathlyHallows.doc’ can be found on infected PCs and once opened the only words inside are: Harry Potter is dead.

But it doesn’t end there.[more]

Tags: Malware