“YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” email virus refers to a recent malicious email campaign designed to spread malware. Malware operators have disguised this email to look like a warning from YouTube about issues with a YouTube channel. If users interact with the email, they may end up losing access to their email and other important accounts. It’s difficult to say what malware this malicious spam campaign is distributing but whatever it is, it’s nothing good.
“YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” email virus claims that you have supposedly received a copyright infringement warning for your YouTube account following complaints. Supposedly, videos posted on your YouTube channel may contain copyrighted content and thus, have been reported. The email claims that the complaints will be reviewed by YouTube in the near future, and if found to be true, you will receive a strike. After three strikes, your YouTube channel would supposedly be deleted.
Copyright infringement warning
Hello,
Moderation will review these complaints in the near term, and if confirmed, your videos will be removed and your channel will get a strike.
Upon reaching 3 strikes, your channel will be blocked without the possibility of appeal.Video Title:
Link:
Applicant:
Possible causes:
Your video may contain copyrighted content.
Copyright holders can block YouTube videos that contain their content.
Read the full report in the document at the link below, if you do not read the report in this case you can not appeal the moderation decision.
The email asks you to review a document containing information about the warnings by clicking on the “Open Full Report” link. If you were to click on the link, a ZIP file would likely download. If you then unzip the file, there should be a DOCX file, which if opened would initiate malware. As we have already said, it’s difficult to say which malware specifically would initiate because malware campaigns can distribute all kinds of infections.
We have seen reports about password-stealing trojans being among the malware this “YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” email virus spreads. Some users have reportedly lost all access to their email and other important accounts after opening the file hidden in this email. Such a trojan could be logging keystrokes or showing overlay screens to trick users into typing in their login credentials on fake sites. This would result in users’ accounts being stolen.
Another type of malware this “YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” email virus may spread is a banking trojan. A banking trojan would steal users’ banking login credentials and/or show fake screens to trick users into making transactions to accounts that belong to malicious actors.
Ransomware could also be spread using “YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” emails. Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts users’ personal files and takes them hostage. Ransomware operators try to sell victims a decryptor for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. But even paying the ransom does not guarantee that a decryptor will actually be sent to victims. And while free decryptors are sometimes released by malware researchers, it’s not always possible.
While ransomware would be a very noticeable infection because it encrypts files, trojans may not be. In order to successfully steal users’ sensitive information, trojan infections need to be stealthy to avoid detection. Without an anti-virus program, a trojan may stay undetected for a long time.
How to recognize malicious emails
Most emails carrying malware can be identified pretty easily. They’re often pretty low-effort and full of grammar/spelling mistakes. These mistakes are very obvious when senders claim to be from legitimate companies emailing customers with important business. Legitimate emails (especially automatically-generated ones) will very rarely have any mistakes because they look very unprofessional.
This particular “YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” email looks more sophisticated because it does not have too many obvious mistakes. Some of the phrasings sound rather strange but it’s not particularly noticeable.
Many malicious emails are sent from random-looking email addresses. For example, they may be made up of random combinations of letters and numbers. Emails sent from such email addresses can largely be ignored because they’re likely either spam or malicious.
The email address is one of the first things you should check when you receive an email that asks you to perform an action like opening an attachment or clicking on a link. The email address sending the “YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” emails looks very unprofessional so it’s immediately obvious that it’s not actually sent by YouTube. However, even if an email address looks legitimate, you should still look into whether it actually belongs to whomever the sender claims to be. A simple search with Google can often be enough. If an email address belongs to malicious actors, you would likely find results in forums of users warning about emails from that address.
How an email addresses you can also tell a lot about whether it’s legitimate or a malicious email. For example, when companies send emails to customers, they usually address them using their names. This is a tactic used to make the email seem more personal. But malicious actors usually do not have access to personal information so they use words like “User”, “Member”, “Customer”, etc., to address users.
Lastly, we should mention that when malicious actors target someone specific, the emails would likely be much more sophisticated. They would not have any grammar/spelling mistakes in them, address users by name, as well as contain some detail that would make the email look more credible. You always need to be very careful when dealing with unsolicited emails and double-check everything before doing anything.
“YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” email virus removal
If you get the “YouTube Copyright Infringement Warning” email in your inbox, you can just ignore it. Ideally, you should delete it. As long as you do not open the file linked to the email, you don’t really need to do anything. However, if you did open the malicious file, you need to scan your computer with anti-malware software immediately. Depending on what the anti-malware program finds, you may need to perform additional actions. If a password-stealing trojan is detected, you will need to change your passwords from a malware-free device as soon as possible.
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