UPDATE: There is no YouTube virus.
From CrunchGear:
[UPDATE: Spoke with Google/YouTube and apparently anti-spyware software from Computer Associates had been returning false positives, identifying certain files contained within YouTube embed codes as malware. The specific YouTube issue is apparently being corrected by Computer Associates and wasn’t actually harmful in the first place. If you’ve got CA software, you might want to check for any updates.]
From: http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/12/02/actnsswift-virus-affecting-embedded-youtube-vids/
Apparently some sort of relatively aggressive virus is affecting certain embedded YouTube videos. Some are saying it affects IE and Firefox users, while others say it’s only going after IE. The virus is called Actns/Swif.T and seems to contain a redirect to a phishing website embedded within a SWF file.
The site apparently installs Antivirus 2009, which is malware. We’ll pull our most recent YouTube embeds, but be careful because this one appears to have just broken out today. If you find yourself being automatically redirected or experience other weird pop-ups, especially for something called Antivirus 2009, don’t click on anything.
We’re doing the same.
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There have been variants of this for a couple years. It looks quite legitimate, firing up an ‘XP Antivirus 200x’ window that looks very Microsoft-ish. I personally was the recipient, as I downloaded a font file from a source I trusted. Even though my A/V software alerted me, the thing installed itself in a number of ways and a number of places, so it still kept popping up. It took several tries using several different ‘fixes’ to rid myself of it.
The good news is it doesn’t actually destroy anything (except your nerves).
The originators unleashed this thing to sell their removal tool. Bastards.
This is old news… We have been battling this for some time… Unless you own a mac… Then you are still virus free!! I love my Apple computer!!
My wife’s computer got infected twice by this one over a week ago. The kids use that machine. She had to reboot a couple of times because it appeared to cause generation of multiple window instances and kept her from being able to do anything productive. Kaspersky picked it up as a virus a couple of days later.
We have XP machines. The virus appears to cause Windows Security Center to alert you that your machine is at risk and you really need Antivirus 2009.
The first time it happened I was able to uninstall Antivirus 2009. The second time I had to remove all instances in the registry and in the disk folders. If I remember correctly it pointed to a file named av2009.exe or something similar.
It was a pain to deal with for a couple of days.
My Norton A/V caught that one last night!