A new attack imitates the dreaded blue screen of death as cover so it can silently install bundles of spyware onto the machine.

Researchers at FaceTime Security Labs say the attack uses a blue screen of death screensaver and bundles it with the spyware files. “Seems the bad guys are not without a sense of humor. Hiding a blizzard of infection file installs behind a legitimate screensaver created by a security expert is pretty bizarre,” blogged Chris Boyd, director of malware research at FaceTime Labs.

It’s unclear how widespread the infection is so far, Boyd told Dark Reading, but it’s still fairly new. “It's hard to tell what the spread is so far, but it does seem to be popping up more and more on help and support forums, which is a sure sign of an increasing spread,” Boyd says. “It's recent enough that the spread probably is not huge yet, but it's bundled with the screensaver, which has been a popular joke for a few years.”

The attack installs the Fake.AV and Smiddy spyware families, which come with Trojans that give an attacker control of the infected PC. “Fake.AV tricks the user into purchasing various different rogue anti-spyware applications. It produces numerous official-looking advertisements in order to manipulate the user into purchasing the product,” Boyd says. “Smiddy manipulates the victim's computer into using a malicious copy of explorer.exe in order to the let attacker to gain control. It also looks for and deletes critical anti-malware components related to QQDoctor and Eset Nod32.”

When the spyware installation is complete, the screen displays various fake warnings about spyware being detected on the machine, with links to “clean” the machine.

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading