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.

Both the Antipiracy foundation scanners that supposedly identified pirated content on the PCs of targeted individuals and ICPP Foundation "law firm" are fakes.

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: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001931.html
One unfortunate example of a user who fell for the ICPP extortion Trojan ruse can be found here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100411040845AA2dqUl

(Reg.)