A sneaky new Trojan attempts to extort money from BitTorrent users under the guise of a fictitious copyright infringement lawsuit.

Malicious pop-up messages generated by the malware, which is being spread via fake files offered up for download through BitTorrent, seeks to bully victims into agreeing to pay out for a "pre-trial settlement" of $400 in order to avoid possible prosecution over supposed copyright piracy violations.

Infected users receive warnings every time they reboot their system, warns net security firm F-Secure. The scammers have sought to lend credibility to the ruse by setting up an official-looking but bogus website at icpp-online.com, which was taken offline on Monday afternoon.

The domain was registered to "Shoen Overns", using an email address previously associated in the registration of domains associated with the Zeus information-stealing Trojan and Koobface scams.

A full-write up of the scam can be found in a blog posting by F-Secure here. One unfortunate example of a user who fell for the ICPP extortion Trojan ruse can be found here. ®

Related stories

• Firefox 4 beta crack ruse spreads Trojan to total idiots (6 August 2010)
• Linux IRC server leaves backdoor open (14 June 2010)
• Japanese police cuff Hentai smut scam suspects (27 May 2010)
• Broadband boss: 'The end of freeloading is nigh' (20 April 2010)
• Hentai malware publishes web history of marks online (16 April 2010)
• Hollywood lawyers have another go at Aussie ISP (25 February 2010)
• Which? warns on pirate letters (27 January 2010)
• How malware frames the innocent for child abuse (9 November 2009)
• Ransomware author tracked down, but not nicked (1 October 2008)
• Ransomware Trojan locks up infected PCs (3 January 2008)
• Trojan attack takes files hostage (25 May 2005)