Fake anti-virus cloaks itself to appear to be Microsoft Update

stilltheone

We are seeing the criminals behind fake anti-virus continuing to customize their social engineering attacks to be more believable to users and presumably more successful.

Last week I wrote about fake Firefox malware warnings leading users to rogue security software. This week they've started to imitate Microsoft Update....

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KillerWatt

So it's only Firefox users who are vulnerable, so much for that being more secure than IE then :rotfl:

Browntoa

and only a month after the Mac "we don't need antivirus" malware attack

Yolina

The blurb gives it away though... "this tool is necessary for you computer to make your system being protected from hi-jacking" :rotfl:and the "its download is crucial if you value your personal data and your privacy" is definitely a tad OTT. It's usually along the lines of "this patch addresses vulnerability XYZ" and that's about it

dixiebb

KillerWatt wrote: »

So it's only Firefox users who are vulnerable, so much for that being more secure than IE then :rotfl:

:rotfl: every browser has its pitfalls - some more than others !;):cool::A

buglawton

Erm... any web browser, including Chrome, can display a web page and also a web page that looks like the above.

It''s the choice of anti-badsite plugins that matters, not the browser.

Saturnalia

Oh not another one! I got the Microsoft Recovery virus today, that's another that looks like a real Microsoft programme. I've got Norton but it got past that. Thankfully fixable but it took hours.

buglawton

How can a standard web browser window look like a real Microsoft programme?

dixiebb

Saturnalia wrote: »

Oh not another one! I got the Microsoft Recovery virus today, that's another that looks like a real Microsoft programme. I've got Norton but it got past that. Thankfully fixable but it took hours.

'looks like' ? that's where the similarity ends ! have your wits about you !:beer:

Saturnalia

buglawton wrote: »

How can a standard web browser window look like a real Microsoft programme?

No idea how it does it, but it doesn't look like a web browser window. It comes up on the screen and appears to be running a scan and coming up with all these alerts that you have viruses, no hard drive space left, and dozens of other things wrong, then appears to be running a defragment. And it does look like a real Microsoft programme, the warning sign is that you can't close it down. Then at the end it tries to sell you a programme to fix these faults it has supposedly found, obviously a scam.

I got it a few months back as well on a different computer and both times it appeared to have wiped out everything I had stored on the computer - however this time I found it doesn't delete anything, it renames and hides it all, and it seems that's the scam - when you pay them the money it will unhide everything again.

A friend also got this and paid PC World £80 to fix it all and add Norton (though that's what I was using both times and it didn't stop this virus) but I got shot of it using instructions I found on Google from a site called Bleeping Computer. Takes a few hours to fix but it's free.

jim22

Had a suspicious one pop up on fly or die darts earlier. People say never to use the cancel button within the fake anti-virus but to get out of it by using x top right. sometimes they wont let you. Can you simply use log off in the windows start button. I always run scans after these warnings and never find anything.