Effective, but not terribly practical….

I’m no Girls Aloud expert, all I know is there are five female members (Cheryl Cole nee Tweedy, Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberly Walsh), they’ve had 18 consecutive top ten hits, and they were the last act to officially feature on the now defunct Top of the Pops. That’s all I know. Oh, and ‘Biology’ peaked at a lowly 26 on the Australian charts. That’s really the extent of my knowledge.

However, I do know a Trojan virus when I see one, so this is just a quick note to say be on your guard.

According to systems security experts McAfee, almost 500,000 people have been caught out over the last few days by a booby trapped media file.

The file, which poses as a music track, short video or movie, has been sitting on a number of peer to peer applications, including eDonkey and Limewire. The little rogue has a number of different titles, including ‘girls aloud st trinnians.mp3’, which (as someone who isn’t the least bit interested in Girls Aloud) I obviously wouldn’t be trying to download (*cough*).

However, I might have gone for one of the others. The full list of filenames and aliases this infected file goes under are:

girls aloud st trinnians.mp3

changing times earth wind .mp3

heartbroken fast t2 ft jodie.mp3

meet bambi in kings harem.mp3

paralyized by you.mp3

pull over levert.mp3

If you download one of these files and run the fake codec expecting to hear a song, a bundle of adware and pop-ups will plague you instead, rendering your computer unusable.

So please be careful when you’re file-sharing today. Visit Broadband Choices for tips on how to stay safe online and beef up your firewall. You may also want to take a look at our guide to downloading.

Now, did I mention Nadine Coyle stands at 5’5” in her bare feet?