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Children Used To Steal Parents' Data

Posted by samzenpus on from the virtual-fagin dept.

Barence writes "PC Pro's Davey Winder has revealed how pre-school children are being targeted by data thieves. Security vendors have uncovered a bunch of Flash-based games, colorful and attractive to young kids, which came complete with a remote access trojan. The trojan is usually installed behind a button to download more free games, but BitDefender even found one painting application where the very act of swiping the paintbrush over an online pet to change the color of the virtual animal was enough to trigger redirection to an infected site."

4 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And parents wonder by William+Robinson · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It is not all that difficult to create different account for the kids and ask them to use it religiously. I normally keep my home folder encrypted, so no matter how smart the Trojan is, will never get access to my data, as long as I am not logged in.

    --
    hilarious
  2. True that by parallel_prankster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My nephews and niece did this when they used to visit my parents place. Within days of their visit my dad, who is not much of a computer person, will call me asking why windows has stopped working. I got a lot of software installed on their computer to monitor these things, yet somehow the kids always managed to install some crap. One good thing that happened was when they turned their attention to Ipads. It has apps on it that are kid friendly but haven't seen Viruses Trojans etc in Ipad apps yet.

    1. Re:True that by Pausanias · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You can disable in-app payments globally on iDevices, and *that* requires a separate passcode to undo compared to the regular app installation password.

      Also, in my experience Apple are pretty good about refunding you money if things like this happen. Once I bought an expensive app for my parents and they charged it to my credit card rather than my gift card balance. I wrote them about it and they credited me back $50 and said they wouldn't charge me on my gift card either---freebee, just like that.

  3. Re:And parents wonder by shadowmas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Generally yes. But remember that anything running on the VM is behind your routers firewall and might be in a more permissive network. So it can be used as a platform to execute a exploit to gain access to other machines on the network, the host machine or maybe even compromise the router/firewall (defualt passwords anyone?).

    I use VMs when I test applications if I'm not sure about its origin, but you should always be carefull about how it's network access and such.