A new fraud by Internet scam artists attempts to tap into video game aficionados’ burning desire to play Microsoft Xbox games on their personal computers. An “Xbox emulator” currently being offered for free on the Web is actually a Trojan horse designed to covertly rack up money for its authors using pay-for-click and other schemes, malicious code experts said.
Instead of enabling users to run popular Xbox games such as “Halo” on their PCs, executing the fake emulator’s installation program, “EMU_xbox.exe”, merely produces error messages.
All that’s installed on the victim’s PC is a “back door” program called “NetBUIE.exe”, which silently attempts to contact numerous remote servers, including four operated by Microsoft and two by online advertising network DoubleClick, according to a preliminary analysis by TruSecure Corporation.
“It’s obviously greyware or scaliwag-ware of some sort,” said Roger Thompson, director of malicious code research for TruSecure.
According to Thompson, the program may generate revenues for its creators by tallying up ad impressions and click-throughs at some of the remote Web sites.
According to a counter service used by the back-door program at Microsoft’s Bcentral.com site, NetBUIE has contacted the Fastcounter site nearly 4 million times.
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