The JEHM Net News

As of January 19, 2007, Symantec Security Response is advising users to be cautious of any unsolicited email which contains attachments that claim to be legitimate or interesting, due to a recent trojan horse named Trojan.Peacomm.

The Trojan horse arrives as an attachment to an email purporting to contain a video of one of several different recent news stories. The attachment may be one of the following: FullVideo.exe, FullStory.exe, Video.exe, ReadMore.exe, FullClip.exe.

The attachment is actually a trojan horse that will install itself on the system and download other malicious programs from various computers on the Internet. The attachment and the trojan horse it contains will be detected as Trojan.Peacomm. Other malicious programs that are commonly downloaded by this threat include Trojan.Abwiz.F and W32.Mixor.Q@mm.

Once installed and running, this threat attempts to establish communication with other infected systems on the Internet via a custom peer-to-peer network. This network is used as the distribution source from which the other malicious programs are downloaded.

Symantec Security Response has analyzed the threat and has provided protection for it via LiveUpdate and Intelligent Updater. The latest AntiVirus (AV) definitions will detect all known variants of the Trojan.Peacomm trojan horse.

(Symantec)

A woman who won a video game console by downing massive quantities of water in California radio contest said Monday she was shocked by the death of a fellow contestant.

“You don’t think water’s going to kill you,” Lucy Davidson told CNN. “You’re at the radio station having fun.”

Jennifer Lea Strange, 28, mother of three, died late Friday after drinking over two litres of water in station KDND 107.9’s “Hold your Wee for a Wii” contest, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Contestants in the California city of Sacramento competed to see how much water they could hold without going to the bathroom. The prize was the highly-sought Nintendo Wii gaming console that was hard to come by during the Christmas splurge.

After the 6 am contest, Srrange went to work but complained of a headache and went home, the Bee reported. She was found dead about 2 pm.

During the contest, a nurse called in to the station warn of the dangers of drinking too much water quickly. Her worries were dismissed by the disc jockey, The Bee reported.

Experts said too much water can dilute the body’s chemical balance, or even cause organs such as the brain to swell.

The winner, Davidson, said she was “sick” afterwards.

“I was throwing up, I couldn’t even function, I couldn’t do anything,” she said.

(playfuls.com)

A Sacramento County woman died over the weekend from water intoxication after participating in a radio contest called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii.”

As the name implies, the contest at KDND 107.9 had contestants drinking large amounts of water, and the one that could resist the urge to urinate for the longest period of time would win a Wii.

28-year-old Jennifer Strange died on Friday after participating in the contest. “She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad,” said co-worker Laura Rios. “She was crying, and that was the last that anyone had heard from her.”

Another participant in the contest said that Strange told him she was trying to win a Wii for her kids.

A coroner had determined that her death was “consistent with a water intoxication death.”

The AP described the radio station’s VP and marketing manager as “stunned” after the news of Strange’s death.

Contestants had to drink an 8-ounce bottle every 15 minutes, but later in the contest, they had to drink larger bottles. It’s unclear how much Strange drank.

According to About.com, under normal circumstances, water intoxication is very rare. However, when one drinks too much water within a short span of time, the dilution of sodium causes tissue swelling, resulting in pressure on the brain and nerves, causing seizures, coma and eventually death if not treated.