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UK PC Users Hit By Huge Fake Antivirus Attack
An anonymous reader writes "UK Internet users were on the receiving end of a large drive-by web attack at the end of February, which attempted to push fake antivirus at least 750,000 times on a single day alone, security company AVG has said. According to a company analysis, on Sunday 27 February, detection levels for the previously obscure Russian 'Blackhole' exploit kit suddenly spiked to 900,000 globally from a few tens of thousands that would be typical for such kits, before dropping back again. Unusually, almost 750,000 of these detections were for UK PCs, which offers a baseline for what must have been a sustained attack several times that size against mainstream web servers frequented by users in the country."
Does it seem to anyone else that the background tasks (like preventing malware) you have to perform in order to use computers have increased to the level where computers aren't fun any more?
What will the result of this be?
More and more people will be attracted to the Apple closed garden model.
That, on the other hand, doesn't appeal to us geeks.
Is there a future for open platforms, and what can the FOSS community do to keep them both 1) open and 2) safe?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I wonder, are the Mac users protected by their stupidity from fake anti-virus software. Were they thinking along the lines of a Certain XKCD comic but with Mac OS in place of liniux.
No mention of the Malware attacks named "McAfee" and "Symantec."
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
they live in the shadows, & on the media now. some have been identified. eugenatics (vaccines, caste system), weapons peddlers, ga stone freemasons (4.billion too many of US?), kings (inbred/altered)/minions(politics/military), fake weather cos., adrians, rothschilds, turners, cheneys, it goes on&on.
If you take your meds it stops going on and on.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It only cost me $25.00 and seems to be finding all kinds of stuff and it's tells me it's working well!
Apple OS X is less secure than Windows. More people use PC computers, more people use Windows, so obviously, people will write viruses and malware FOR them, and thus, Anti-Viruses and protection is made to keep up with it. No one really attacks OS X, and thus, Apple likes to be gleeful in saying its secure when it fact, it's not. Not at all.
I own a small PC repair shop here in the UK and we had about 20 PCs in during a two week period with this malware. After that most AV software was detecting it and automatically removing it. It wasn't terribly virulent and booting into safe-mode was enough to prevent it running.
Used them, uninstalled them & even had to google search "how do i completely remove norton." They might as well be fakes themselves and what alarms me most is the number of noobs & businesses who use their product and think they are protected.
Anyway, question: Who manages or creates those links you get when you search for "top 10 antivirus" or "best antivirus 2010?"
Just offer them a preview of the next iPhone or whatever, the stupid ones will run that.
which is totally what she said
well portrayed by the well owned media as such. what he writes about, is much of what we're seeing, if we look. eisenhower & kennedy had similar views. one of kennedy's last speeches was a 'we're coming for you' aimed at the banking industry. his brother had similar aspirations, & demise. so long ago.
I've spent the past month clearing up the fall out of this explosion of Fake AV... It's the most common issue I see on computer in my repair shop these days, and has been for a few years now, but this confirms why it's been so hectic the past couple of weeks!
I am amused that AVG are going on about it when, like the rest of the mainstream antivirus products, AVG itself cannot prevent or remove these Fake AVs- by the time the user brings their computer to me, AVG, or any other antivirus is broken and crying in the corner of C:\Program Files, or just gone completely.
They largely are. These offers of protection tend to download .EXE's since these fake antivirus companies don't waste time on anything that's non-Windows. In addition, a large majority of Mac users don't bother with Antivirus so they simply ignore these. Last but not least, they tend to be less gullible than Windows users.
http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and-software/networking/news/218521
http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-users-gullible-advertising/
Last but not least, these types of attacks tend to be fear driven and Windows users simply have more to fear from Viruses than Mac users at the moment. After years of sustained attacks, they are simply much to jumpy and easily frightened to pass up.
Had a typical midwesterner conversation this morning in college. It wasn't over exactly this antivirus fakeout, but it led up to the flaws behind the antivirus system, namely the symbiotic relationship between virus/antivirus. But the reason the antivirus companies make so much money, and the reason why fake virus attacks work, and so on, is because people are educated from the wrong directions.
This morning, after somebody realised I was a computer programmer they asked if I could hack into computer systems. Once we got past my incredulous phase where I can't believe somebody would ask something like that out in the open in front of other people, it came down to, "no, I can't, or if I can I don't want to".
Do you walk up to people and say "could you jack a car?" "Could you murder somebody?" Just right out in the open, not even meeting them? Try it out like this: do you tell them, "yeah, oh yeah!" You know how much federal time that is, right out the gate? By the time you affirm something like that, it's not the other person's liable time, either, it's yours. Even if it's also illegal to ask in the first place, seeking to conspire over these things and soliciting such skill through such a line of questioning.
But if it's computer hacking, well everybody feels that's a great thing. Everybody wants to know a hacker, see a hack going on. This is why it's very lucrative to make games where a person believes they are hacking a computer system, but never to make it very complex: they wouldn't know a hack if they were one, but they love the idea of trumping all this new-fangled computer nonsense that puts knots in their brains and makes them feel inferior. Oh, if only they could hack the machine and get it out of the damn way and just get down to brass tacks and business.
So I had to weather wave after wave of this guy begging for the reality of the grey-hat market. That maybe it's okay to commit computer crimes because if you get caught, you won't go to jail, the NSA will show up with the men in black and hire you into the upper, upper, uppity echelon of secret dream, top-level, wish fulfillment and instant gratification the real world won't let you have.
He promoted himself as some kind of brilliant business person, because he's spending money to go to college for business. He didn't even know to bring cash with him to do the printing he needed for this uppity business class trip of his, and wasn't independent minded enough to put it together on his own. I explained to him how to put the scanner and the printer together through the computer and pay for it off his printing account instead. I didn't even get a thanks, just a frankly indifferent, self-scolded, urban-culture "yeah that'll work that's cool".
So, when he got on me about where's all the grey hat money money, I told him, it's not supposed to be like that. The systems should be installed properly and used properly the first time. You don't go around giving your housekey away to strangers all in order to sustain the police records filing level industry, do you? You keep your shit secure because you want it. You do that because that's what your instincts want, is security. That's exactly what an employer is thinking, too. They aren't saying, hey, I want holes in my security to hire a grey-hat, so I'm going to go buy a security system, have it installed properly, and then have a mad hatter at the front desk surfing the web from an admin level unpatched windows desktop and taking bathroom breaks with the system password post-it noted over the keyboard numerical pad. That way I can hire a cool-sounded thing, like, the rugged individualist down on his luck who got caught stealing my wife's credit card number and now has been hand-picked by the NSA to come to me to charge me twice for my security: once to point out how I screwed it up and again to install the whole new system.
When I put it to him like that, he said, well, ha-ha, it's obvious you don't know biz-niss. I explained as well as I could that, in fact, he doesn't know bu
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Hey, the headline forgot to include, "Mac Users Unaffected" :)
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
I can almost answer my own question. I've run into too many people who don't WANT to know anything about their computers. Sort of like that old Barbie "Girls aren't good at math" thing, except it's "I'm not a computer person so I'm not GOOD at computers" and they're doing it to themselves. My gut does tell me that this is worse with older people, but not 100%.
There's been a spike in the US too. We've seen more of those type of repairs recently.
And I want to like AVG, but their program can't fix it. :(
Effigy? Why, Lord Inglip, if you insist...
...there is a huge difference.
I've not saw it reported elsewhere, but a lot of people who got this fake AV (it was "system tools"), seemed to get it in drive-by-fashion from ebay.
These plebs should install Linux and be totally free!
I'm not trying to imply that end users need to go all the way and install GNU/Linux on a PC or buy a GNU/Linux based phone or PDA such as the N900 or Pandora. But at least they should buy devices with the option of turning on the equivalent of Android's "Settings > Applications > Unknown sources". Ask anybody who had an idea for a PS3, Wii, or home theater PC game but had to retool it for Xbox 360 (with all its flaws) because PS3 and Wii have no indie developer program and HTPC penetration is next to nil. Or ask Bob Pelloni, who anybody who had an idea for a DS, PSP, or GP2X game but had to retool it for iOS and Android because DS and PSP have no indie developer program and GP2X penetration is next to nil.
TuxRacer it is!
You know, there is a middle ground between video games released as free software or freeware and video games developed by an established company with an office and employees who have years of experience working for an incumbent video game developer. It's just that certain walled gardens make it difficult to jump that gap without moving hundreds of miles away to another state.
I don't give credence to anything AVG says, since I caught its version 9.0 product red-handed denying me the ability to format any of my disk drives so long as it was installed. It maintained continually open files/folders on every drive, such that Windows would refuse to allow formatting any of them, and not just the boot drive. I uninstalled it and never looked back. The day an AV product denies me the ability to use a fundamental feature of the operating system is the day that product gets the boot.
So it appears by "out of the box" you mean "preinstalled". But the last time Microsoft included a lot of preinstalled software, it got slapped down in U.S. antitrust court.
I think a lot of people would disagree that Mac users are "less gullible" than windows users. Considering Apple is lauded for being "such a good marketing company that can get people to pay significantly more for a product that the competition charges a bit less and also provides more features" would actually scream to me that "apple buyers are more gullible".
Not trying to say my "fact" is more truthy than yours but hopefully you see the problem with that statement now that is supported by bad statistics from that fanboi article you link to (for example, how about "making ads look like windows pop-ups are more effective than making them look like apple pop-ups").
This happened to my sister, who isn't really a dumb person. After talking with her I've come to establish the profile of an individual that would fall for these kinds of attack:
1. They are very trusting of something when they do trust it. This behavior is often associated with people who do well at school and follow their parents advice/beliefs
2. They don't use their computer much anymore, mainly relying on their phone instead
3. They own a computer that came pre-installed with an antivirus brand they don't recognize, so all they know about is that they wouldn't recognize it if it gave them a pop-up
4. Their anti-virus is expired and they falsely believe an expired anti-virus would detect viruses but refuse to to clean them
5. They get this fake virus full screen banner when they visit a trusted website. In my sister's case it was hotmail.com. This leads me to suspect it could had been either a rogue banner or she has a virus on her machine prior to the incident
6. Money is not an issue for them so they would rather throw money (and their credit card information) at an immediate problem ("YOUR COMPUTER HAS A VIRUS") than stop and think about the situation they aren't familiar with and try to deduce what is really happening
7. They don't read the newspaper in detail much anymore so they miss the millions of columns that have already warned about this scam
Fortunately she called me within minutes of installing the software and realized it all started to be very suspicious. We then got a new credit card number, disputed the charges, and used system restore (which is apparently all that is needed to get rid of this particular fake anti-virus).
You do know that the article you link to merely says that there are more clickthroughs coming from IE than from Safari? This is a bit like saying that Luxemborgians are less gullible than Americans because they buy less off of Ebay.
I started using PCs in 1987. I've been using Linux for over a decade. I have firewalls, anti-virus on all my (Windows) PCs and generally take care out there on the Interweb. I am the person the rest of my family calls when their computers go wrong.
And still I got infected at the end of February. My first malware infection ever.
At the time of the infection (or at least the timestamps on the files I later removed after dual-booting into Ubuntu) my wife was using the family PC to surf some popular websites - checking details of a large London hotel she was visiting, as well as flight times into Heathrow, that sort of thing. No dodgy porn sites involved (as far as I know). She was running a user account without admin privileges.
To this day I'm not 100% sure how we got infected, but I think it's possibly because our version of Java was about 18 months out of date - turns out the automatic update hadn't been working (and hadn't made a big enough noise about the failure for me to react). Maybe I'm just comforting myself but I think that this was a *very* sophisticated attack and I'm not surprised that so many users fell victim to it.
The attitude I usually see from Mac owners, is more "Haha, with my powerful OSX I am invulnerable to all know Viruses!". An attitude which will in time create it's own problems, I suspect.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.