Fake YouTube pages which look very similar to the real thing have been uncovered by security experts at eSoft, and they deliver a deadly payload. According to the eSoft Threat Prevention Team there are at least 135,000 of these fake YouTube pages, sitting on thousands of compromised web servers, and each attempting to install a malware executable should an unwary user be fooled into attempting to play the videos contained on them.

There's nothing new in the methodology here: promise videos related to hot news items such as the BP oil spill for example, and then pop-up the 'you need to download this video codec to play the video' warning which is in fact the trigger for a malware executable download and install.

The fact that such a big group of pages, all hosted on compromised but unsuspecting and otherwise genuine web servers and all attempting to fool the user into thinking they are connecting to a kosher YouTube site is worrying, however.