Hackers in Grand Forks, North Dakota of all places have hit on a clever Trojan Horse: using a fraudulent parking ticket to direct unsuspecting motorists to their virus laden websites.

The scam works like this: You come back to your parked car and there's a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. Everything looks official so you go home, and, being a law abiding citizen you visit the website on the ticket as directed. In order to make sure it was your car, you have to flip through a gallery of evidence and find your car. In order to do this, you have to download a toolbar and that's how they get you. The toolbar is loaded up with an executable file. When the computer restarts is when the fun begins. Your computer becomes a nightmare of pop-up windows talking about downloadable antivirus software and all hell breaks loose from there.

It is a pretty clever scam, and we have to hand it to this particular hacker for thinking laterally. That doesn't mean we don't want virus-generating hackers to burn for eternity in the deepest, most fiery pits of hell but... at least he or she isn't hacking electronic road signs, right? [BBC]