PC CyberTekThe cyberspace visitor’s information center

I’m sure you have all seen this before. Your surfing along, when all of a sudden, you get a pop-up that alerts you that your computer is infected! YIKES! What to do!??! Ah, you can just download a “free” program that will fix it for you. I’d hope you already know, this is a scam. It’s one of two things. You can either download a legit program that will scan your computer, tell you how badly infected it is and you can purchase a full version of the program to remove all your “infections.” Just in case your not really infected, these programs will increase your infection count by adding your cookies to the list. Pretty good way to jack up the numbers, but I wouldn’t call cookies an infection. And I sure don’t have to buy any program to remove them. The other thing that could happen, and probably will is, you will download a program that will then install it’s own addware. Turns out they have a name for this stuff now, and that name is Scareware.

Turns out many people are still falling for this scam. I had to clean my parents computer up, from one of these. Try doing it over VNC, and you may have your patience tested like I did. Anyways, the old folks aren’t the only ones falling for this, and now their is a new variation. Spware Protect 2009, is the new breed of scareware. Not only does it con you by getting you to install it, it actually does damage to get you to “purchase” it for $49.99 and install a trojan downloader. Meanwhile it increases the pop ups telling you how infected your computer is. So you order the program with your credit card and guess what, you just gave them your credit card number, no hacking needed. A local electronics store, with the initials RS, got hit by it and from what I could get out of them, sounds like the whole corp has been infected through their network.

Since I first found out about this last week, I’ve found out that it’s now also being installed by the conficker virus. At first I was thinking, wouldn’t people be suspicious if there was a new piece of software, on their computer? I sure as hell would. Then I started thinking about it, in a corporate situation. Some poor schmuck, in accounting or where ever, could think it was installed by their IT Dept. So the keylogger installed would run until the computer crashed. The one good thing is, the domain that was selling Spyware Protect 2009 is gone. Keep an eye out for variations with new names and the same or slightly modified interface.

-Your friendly neighborhood PC Cybertek

With all the media hype about conficker, I thought you might like a good collection of trustworthy resources. Beware of websites that have recently registered as “conficker help.” In fact, just avoid them all together. There’s also reports of malicious software masquerading as detection and cleaning tools for Conficker-infected computers, as well as spam offering the same.

There’s no need to try and figure out what’s safe or real and what has more sinister plans in mind. The good folks at dshield.org have been keeping an updated list of third party information on conficker. Here you can find plenty of free conficker detection and removal tools, general information and the microsoft patch. That should help keep you updated, safe and informed.

I’ve also found out about one other real neat way of detecting it, but it’s for more advanced users, so I’m going to make a seperate post about it.