know your enemy - the workings of a hacker crimering

[office politics]

Perks and paintball: life inside a global cybercrime ring | Security | Features | PC Pro

The company built its wealth pioneering scareware - programs that pretend to scan a computer for viruses, and then tells the user that their machine is infected. The goal is to persuade the victim to voluntarily hand over their credit card information, paying $50 to $80 to "clean" their PC.

Scareware, also known as rogueware or fake antivirus software, has become one of the fastest-growing, and most prevalent, types of internet fraud. Panda Security estimates that each month some 35 million PCs worldwide, or 3.5% of all computers, are infected with these malicious programs, putting more than $400 million a year in the hands of cybercriminals. "When you include cost incurred by consumers replacing computers or repairing, the total damages figure is much, much larger than the out of pocket figure," said Ethan Arenson, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission who helps direct the agency's efforts to fight cybercrime.

 

[remixedcat]

I tell my clients not to trust obscure A/V software. I mostly recommend avast or nod32.

 

[office politics]

AV-Comparatives - Independent Tests of Anti-Virus Software - Welcome to AV-Comparatives.org

According the their results, i think avira has the most detections possible. however, it also has the most false positives. It should be noted that they run using paid software as well. You prolly should double check the reports, it's been awhile since i checked last. I would think the same detections could be made with free software as well though. Paid software prolly has more features such as auto updating, more granular control, and reporting.

 

[TieFighter]

After coming home from a night out with my wife there were viruses on my desktop computer, from the babysitter's use, fitting this kind of description. I can see where a person who isn't good with computers would fall into the trap of believing this malware was actually detecting things on their computer. It made a shield symbol appear in the task bar much like symantec AV and repeatedly gave you notifications that there were fake viruses on your computer with a site that you can go to and pay to get it "fixed". I tried to kill it in task manager on my windows machine, then found the directories where the virus resided and manually deleted them. The fake virus detector even made registry entries, so I had to go through my registry removing that. After all of that I still missed some part of it and ended up re-installing Windows XP instead of Vista after using Linux to wipe the hard drive to ensure Windows didn't leave anything behind.

 

[JoshuaJay]

Get a Mac.

Yup, I said it.

 

[Slaymate]

Get a Mac.

Yup, I said it.

Apple is the new hacker bulls-eye - Jun. 17, 2010

Any computer can be attacked, it just depends on who the bullies want to pick on.

 

[Apokalipse]

If everybody switched to Mac Os X, so would the viruses/malware.