The Benjamin Worm, virus that’s sweeping the Kazaa file-sharing network, is a supposed “white hat” worm that was developed to scare people away from making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works on P2P networks.
According to one of its developers, Paul Komoszki, Benjamin is a “controlled test” of a program designed to disrupt the illegal exchange of copyrighted data and child porn over peer-to-peer networks.
“We do not want to affect the exchange of legal programs and legal music files. Only users who are looking for and sharing copyrighted files could be infected,” said Komoszki in an e-mail interview today.
Once it infects a Kazaa user’s computer, Benjamin creates numerous copies of itself under file names that may be of interest to other Kazaa users, according to anti-virus firms. Examples include borlanddelphi-full-downloader.exe and Braveheart-Special Edition-divx.exe, according to Kaspersky Labs.
(Thanks, Owlswan!)