The fake file claims to be an mp3 of Girls Aloud

Almost 500,000 people have been caught out by a booby-trapped media file, says security firm McAfee.

The fake file poses as a music track, short video or movie and has been widely seeded on file-sharing networks to snare victims.

McAfee said the fake media file outbreak was the largest it had seen for about three years.

Those running the fake file get bombarded with pop-up ads and risk compromising the safety of their PC.

The fake file or trojan has been widely distributed on the eDonkey and Limewire file-sharing networks.

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Security training organisation the Sans Institute claims centralised patch management can be used to counter the threat of automated, patch-based exploit generation.

The advice, published on Monday, follows the release of research from the University of California at Berkeley, University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University that maintains that exploits for vulnerabilities in code can be reverse-engineered from patches and generated automatically.

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