Fake Antivirus Warnings
I’m sure many of you working in IT have seen Antivirus2009, or 2008 as the case may have been. It’s a fake antivirus app that gets installed as malware and does who knows what all to an infected PC. A few weeks ago I hit a site that was serving that junk in an add, and noticed that the scren looked an awful lot like Windows Explorer. Might have even fooled me into thinking that’s what it was for a moment if I wasn’t using my Macbook at the time.
Bill Gardner has the screenshot, and some more info on this threat. Take a good look at it, and realize that clicking anywhere in that screen is going to cause the malware to download. (I seem to recall seeing a screen with only OK as my choice, and had to resport to killing Firefox..)
Now tell me, what training are you going to give a typical, non-techie, home user to avoid infection? How are they going to know this is a scam, and even if they do how are you going to get them to not click anywhere, but open Task Manager and kill the browser that way? See the problem with counting on user education as the “fix” for security? You can’t teach everyone everything. So what do you do while waiting for more secure browsers and web hosts? Pray?
Follow these topics: Tech
*sigh* The real difficulty comes in finding the answer to this question: “how do I describe this to my father-in-law and get him to understand what ‘kill it from process viewer’ means?” These virus/trojan/scam artists are getting just too creative, tanj it all!
Steven, I don’t have the slightest idea how to deal with home users like that. That’s where I’ve seen this malware myself, and I thought what do I tell them to avoid this, if something comes up and tells you the PC is infected, power it off? Then what?