YouTube snafu! Erin Andrews video clean-up backfires

On Sunday morning I discovered that hackers were taking advantage of the notorious Erin Andrews peephole video to infect the owners of Apple Macs and Windows PCs.

It seemed like a good opportunity to make an educational video about the threat which would warn people not to search for the video, which was made without the knowledge or consent of the glamorous ESPN sports presenter as she dressed in her bedroom, and show how easy it was to stumble across a malware infection.

I posted the movie up on YouTube in the SophosLabs video channel, and by today it had received over 180,000 views and been linked to by sites including The Register, The Huffington Press and CNN. That’s a pretty impressive result by our standards.

Unfortunately at 4am this morning I was made aware that…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.