Viruses and You!
Posted: 2010-11-22 12:37am
So today I removed a particularly nasty piece of malware called Vista Antispyware. It cleverly dresses itself up as an Anti-Spyware program and then badgers the user with tons of warning messages and fake scans designed to con you into buying it.
What makes this program really nasty is that it apparently over writes other Anti-Virus programs. Declaring THOSE programs as viruses and then demanding you buy their program to protect yourself. This has been done before, but Vista Antispyware puts up a convincing act...mostly.
The giveaways were its constant badgering of adds, a "scan" which took all of 10 seconds to complete (waaaay faster than the average scanner's speed) and no ability to manually shut the program off in Task Manager. (Which is usually an immediate give away of malicious intent.)
Now if I had ended up with this malware because of a dumbfuck move like clicking on a sketchy link or downloading porn from some backwater website then I wouldn't be here today. What makes this virus worth bringing up is that it's in a special class of really deceptive viruses. According to Google Vista Antispyware downloads itself onto your computer just through visiting a website. So it's intrusive, dishonest, and most importantly, subtle about entry.
Anyone else got any equally impressive efforts in the world of malware? The most important part was the giveaways. What did the malware do/act/say at any stage from pre-download to post-installation that made you suspicious? For us, these things are probably going to seem trivial, but plenty of people really just can't discern a malicious program from a normal one in any way.
What makes this program really nasty is that it apparently over writes other Anti-Virus programs. Declaring THOSE programs as viruses and then demanding you buy their program to protect yourself. This has been done before, but Vista Antispyware puts up a convincing act...mostly.
The giveaways were its constant badgering of adds, a "scan" which took all of 10 seconds to complete (waaaay faster than the average scanner's speed) and no ability to manually shut the program off in Task Manager. (Which is usually an immediate give away of malicious intent.)
Now if I had ended up with this malware because of a dumbfuck move like clicking on a sketchy link or downloading porn from some backwater website then I wouldn't be here today. What makes this virus worth bringing up is that it's in a special class of really deceptive viruses. According to Google Vista Antispyware downloads itself onto your computer just through visiting a website. So it's intrusive, dishonest, and most importantly, subtle about entry.
Anyone else got any equally impressive efforts in the world of malware? The most important part was the giveaways. What did the malware do/act/say at any stage from pre-download to post-installation that made you suspicious? For us, these things are probably going to seem trivial, but plenty of people really just can't discern a malicious program from a normal one in any way.
