The Pinged Hobbit

There is an interesting article over on Secure Works regarding the Windows Antivirus 2008 rouge antivirus software. The article goes indepth and uses screenshots from someone who hacked into the site of the people behind the software to give an idea of the kind of money it is possible for the scammers to make over a short period of time. Given the detail shown it is no wonder these types of programs are becoming more and more common.

The tables show that even though most of the scammers are only getting a 2% conversion rate (i.e. only 2% of people who install the software pay for it) due to the shear number of people installing the software the totals involved can be mind numbing. It’s a sad thing that people are so willing to fleece their fellow man. Hopefully someone will decide to do it back to them.

Following hot on the heels of my recent article about Social Engineering tricks used to deceive users into downloading dangerous software on to their computers comes news of a study conducted in to how users react to popups. Sadly it merely goes to prove that the average computer user is servery lacking in the understanding of the dangers of the online world. The study looked at how a group of students reacted when popups were inserted into a task they had been given. All the popups where of a different style, some looking like a typical Windows warning, some looking completely different. Quite a few of the warnings acting in various ways that would have pointed out that it was a web based popup rather than a system generated warning (i.e. cursor becomes a hand when rolling over the Ok button) Continue reading »

Yesterday I talked about a method used by some companies to trick people into downloading and installing some software on to their computer that was less than good. Lets face it, there are a lot of people out there looking to download something on to people’s computers that is less than good. Some are relatively harmless but annoying like the MBS Payment and Windows Antivirus 2008, but others are rather malicious pieces of code. I like a lot of other people probably get asked to look at computers quite often that are running some malicious code on start up. This never used to be a problem Things that ran at startup used to be easy to locate, it was enough to open up msconfig and scroll down the list of processes running and disable the one you want. Of course things evolve, after a while the people creating these programs found ways to start their programs with out showing them on this list. They created registry keys that were hard to find.

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One of the problems about knowing anything about IT is that family and friends are always asking you for advice or help with their computer problems. I don’t mind helping when I can but it can be damn annoying at times. Recently I’ve encountered two computers where the are reporting that the PC was infected by a trojan and that the only way to remove it was by downloading and paying for some supposedly great anti virus software that most people have never heard of. Now people like me are technically savvy enough to know that quite a lot of links are not safe to download. Unfortunately not everyone who uses a computer knows to stop and think before they download something. they just merrily click on a link and let something download to our pc.

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