Summit has announced that The Twilight Saga: New Moon has officially set a new all-time midnight box office record, taking in $26.27M from 3514 theaters.

This shatters The Dark Knight’s $18.4M midnight debut for a 3-day weekend. It also easily surpasses the all-time record for midnight showings which was held by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which took in $22.2M on a Tuesday night on its way to a 5-day weekend total of $158M. The Dark Knight went on to take in $67.17M that opening day, dropped 29.1% from Friday to Saturday to bring in another $47.65M, and ended with $43.6M on Sunday for an opening weekend total of $158.4M.

TY to the Lexicon. Source: Larry at ProNetworks

Summit reported Thursday afternoon that at midnight showings on 466 screens in Australia, the movie took in AUS$1.7 million ($1.6 million). It sailed past the previous Australian midnight record set by “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” which took in AUS$1.26 million ($1.2 million) in 2005.

In France, where “Moon” completed its first day, it was No. 1 with 488,000 admissions, translating to $4.26 million, from 751 theaters. By comparison, “Twilight” scored 140,960 admissions, $1.158 million, on its first day in that country.

In Italy, partial returns put the movie’s gross at €$1.83 million ($2.7 million) from 625 screens. The movie is shaping up as the third-highest Wednesday opener in Italy, behind only “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

Meanwhile in Spain, “Moon” drew €1.475 million ($2.2 million) on 652 screens. In Spain, it also ranked as the third-best Wednesday opening ever — behind “Order of the Phoenix” and “Half-Blood Prince.”

A Web-enabled attack that’s spreading lures via emails, blogs and corrupted search results is under way targeting Twilight fans. The bait: a chance to see a pirated copy of New Moon before the much-anticipated vampire movie’s official Friday release.

The lures all require the fan to first download a free video player, called streamviewer. But clicking on streamviewer.exe actually results in the swift installation of a wormhole, called a Trojan downloader, on the fan’s harddrive. The bad guys can now load any malicious program they so choose on the PC, says Michael Greene, Vice President of Product Strategy, at PC Tools.
Thus far, the bad guys have been installing a scareware program that launches a fake security scan and tries to get the user to spend $80 for a worthless cleanup and antivirus protection.

For example, when fans searched for “Stephenie Meyer” yesterday on Google, they may have encountered a search result that read “Stephenie Meyer at 365Multimedia.com.” But instead of seeing a legitimate interview, the fake security scan appeared; hitting the cancel button only ensured that the subsequent pitch for worthless protection would follow.

The last time an attack of this scale and sophistication swamped the Internet was during the run up to the last Harry Potter movie, says Greene. While the bad guys, at the moment, appear to be after a quick buck selling scareware, the wormhole they set in place poses an ongoing threat. It gives them the ability to use the PC as part of a botnet to spread spam, steal data and take control of Web mail, social networking and online banking accounts.

Don’t worry guys Twilighters.org is safe to be on!