Protecting Video from Infections

The day before the new Twilight movie was scheduled to open, CNN posted a story warning about viruses embedded in the downloads of movie clips and video interviews.

Of course, the story isn't that surprising – the bad guys take advantage of major news or pop culture events all the time to spread malware. However, legitimate sites are being hijacked in order to create the phony sites, in this case, blogspot.com. A similar problem happened earlier in the fall at the New York Times.  With both the movie downloads and the NYT ad, the user was being redirected to a link for fake antivirus software.

So the problem for businesses becomes how to best protect the videos and other legitimate downloads on their sites. The first order of business, according to PC Tools, the folks who sent out alerts regarding the New Moon viruses, is to make sure the business network is well protected with spyware tools that protect in multiple layers in real time. The anti-spyware needs to be more sophisticated than just "detect and fix”; it also needs to be intuitive to the ever-expanding types of attacks so that it can effectively help the site from being hijacked or spoofed.

Building partnerships with security software companies, which can help identify threats and make sure customers are protected from the bad guys, is one step businesses can take to best protect the end user while keeping the company brand safe. This partnership allows businesses to identify unknown threats or existing threats that dynamically change based on the new "hot thing,” like New Moon.