ID thieves are using the now infamous video of Saddam Hussein’s execution as a trojan horse for ID theft enabling malware. The former Iraqi dictator may have been a lot of bad things in life, but I’ll bet one of them wasn’t a malware writer.

And for those who have been hiding under rocks for the last few weeks, here’s a roundup of Saddam execution/video stories.

I might of actually recommended this list of security precautions, especially considering the target. A lot of folks have just unwrapped their fancy new machines, and now that the kids are all in bed, are probably going to plug them in to the net. They will be quickly infected with some virus or spyware, and that’s all she wrote.

In comes the Department of Homeland Security making suggestions about how to stay safe - but their opening blows the credibility out of the water. Instead of saying trojan horse software “was first discovered in May 2005,” they could have stated “the Department of Homeland Security first discovered the trojan horse threat in May 2005, even though every computer security company on the planet was isolating plenty of them by the late-90’s.”

At least someone might have listened if they were honest. Now a bunch of folks are going to get screwed (with the exception of those who got a boxed Linux distro in their stockings, or were lucky enough to have a loved one who braved the lines at the Apple Store).

There is an email floating around the net that purports to contain pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s capture. It hasn’t happened folks. The attached zip file is really a trojan horse program, and users should not click on said file. In fact, the file is named something silly like anudepics.zip anyway, which is why I deleted it the moment it passed my spam filters (which it does easily since it is mostly plain text and doesn’t contain any explicit references).

Just watch out.