Internet antivirus scam

[Jadzia]

I don't know if anyone else is getting this, but since the weekend I've been redirected to this thing about 20-30 times.

When I click on something in google image search, I'm often getting redirected to a webpage as shown in the image below. The url is not always the same, but the page always looks the same:

After 20 seconds of pretending to find malware, it prompts me to download some "antivirus" program.

I haven't run into these things very often before, only about once or twice a month, so the first purpose of this thread is to ask: Have you been seeing this a lot more these past few days, or is it just me?

This thread has a second purpose: to warn those who do get redirected to a page like this:
DO NOT download anything it suggests, just close the tab.


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[Robert Maxwell]

I've seen a lot of people hit with this little gem. It does a good job of looking like a legitimate antivirus program, and if you click "OK" enough times you'll be infected with some lovely malware that you have to pay money to get rid of.

Instructions are here for removing it. It is often known as "Internet Antivirus 2011," but I've seen flavors going back to 2009.

 

[Marc]

I've know one ore two people hit with this sort of thing but the really disturbing part is that I've had the popups that push the malware on legitimate sites (i.e not porn or illegal downloads etc) which sometimes makes me wonder up about some of the ad servers.

 

[backstept]

clicked a bad link and this came up the other day . . . I immediately closed the tab, but I don't know if I got infected . . . gotta do a scan tonight . . .

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Yes, I'm afraid to say I've had this show up a few times. Fortunately, after my prior adventure with Security Tool I've learnt to be ultra-careful. I usually just shut everything down when one of these pops up, rather than risk clicking the wrong thing.

 

[Goliath]

Yeah, I've seen that one.

I once was also hit with a similar but much nastier antivirus-scam virus that my antiviral software couldn't handle. I had to take my computer to the shop to get it disinfected.

 

[Jonas Grumby]

I haven't seen that particular screen yet, but I do get these bogus "Your system may be infected" scam pop-ups every once in a while. Luckily for me, I know what they are, but I worry about the millions of computer users out there who may not.

It's too bad something can't be done about the scum behind this kind of crap. Maybe if SEAL Team Six needed a quick practice mission sometime...

 

[Misfit Toy]

Jadzia, if you've been redirected that many times just since the weekend, it sounds like you're already infected. I had something similar late last year and it was a real pain to eliminate. It wouldn't let my real virus scanners run either.

 

[captcalhoun]

i've had it periodically over the last few months. not that bad though.

 

[Mr Silver]

What prompts people to come up with Malware? Is it just in their nature to screw around with people's computers?

 

[Deranged Nasat]

What prompts people to come up with Malware? Is it just in their nature to screw around with people's computers?

It seems some people just have an urge to tear down rather than build. It must give them a smug thrill to cause other people irritation or difficulty.

At school other students would go into my pencil case and steal stuff. Not because they needed it, just because. I imagine it's the same mindset that makes people create pointless malware.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

What prompts people to come up with Malware? Is it just in their nature to screw around with people's computers?

In this case there is a profit motive. "Internet Antivirus 2011" itself is a virus (or at least malware), which will keep reporting that your computer has viruses (even though it doesn't necessarily, other than IA2011 itself), and then you have to pay to clean up the viruses it "found." Some people actually do pay for this!

 

[Amaris]

I've seen an uptick in this little sucker, lately, and it's getting trickier to eliminate, too.

 

[Capn Flukie]

It f'd up my netbook pretty good.

 

[Jadzia]

What prompts people to come up with Malware? Is it just in their nature to screw around with people's computers?

In the 1980s, it was a new idea, to create harmless programs that self replicated and possibly evolve as bytes were mutated here and there in the copy process. It was like creating a new lifeform, where code was DNA. Programmers could feel like gods. Occasionally, these programs did get copied with errors and with the new program still working. That was actual evolution of the code.

But these programmer gods had to let the world know who they were, so their programs displayed messages "XYZ says hello. Press any key to continue." which was still benign and lighthearted at that time.

But then these benign programs copied themselves onto people's game disks, accidentally overwriting the bootsector, which broke the game.

People didn't like these programs anymore. They were no longer fun little artifical life programs. they were viruses that broke people's games. And this is where antivirus programs started.

There were those who saw there were ways to circumvent the antivirus. It was a technical challenge more than anything. The person who sees the holes in the security that nobody else can see does have some level of astuteness. It's like being the first to solve a long standing maths problem because at that moment, they alone can see the way through. Making a virus that exploits that security hole is a way of proving their eliteness to other programmers.

In the latter half of the 1990s, Windows was dominating the computer market, and a lot of people were anti-microsoft, for whatever reason. They made viruses for windows specifically because they hated microsoft.

This past five years, because of the growth of the internet and online banking, there's money to be made from stealing data, whether it's your identity, or the details and codes you enter to perform online transactions. Malware is created for this purpose.

Malware is also a middleman business. For example, rootkits allow criminals to buy access to so many thousand PCs at a time, from whoever controls the rootkit. Once purchased, they are able to insert their own viruses remotely into those infected PCs to mine whatever information they want.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

"If you think Malware is Captain Reynolds' brown coat... you might be a redneck."

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

It's too bad something can't be done about the scum behind this kind of crap. Maybe if Seal Team Six needed a quick practice mission sometime...

Well perhaps not to actually shoot them in the head, but put enough fear into them that the cunts shit themselves. I'd go with that.

 

[RandyS]

Yep, I've seen it. I got lucky though and was told about it by a friend beforehand who wasn't so lucky. He thought it was real. It took him a week to fix his computer. It's tried to hit me a few times in the last couple of months, but thanks to my friend, I knew it for what it was, and was able to get rid of it.

 

[BlobVanDam]

I was getting this kind of thing on a bunch of Google image search links only a couple of days ago. It was always redirecting to the same url though, and I never actually let the page load, but I assume it was that same page template. It seemed that the pages that redirected to it were from the same few domains though, so I don't believe it has anything to do with my computer already being infected, and I ran a manual scan afterwards just to be sure and it was clean. Kaspersky is damn good at blocking crap, and it didn't bleep at me when I clicked the link, so I don't think it had a chance to try anything.

But these fake antivirus scams are getting ridiculous, and they do manage to get past virus scanners, and they can be tricky to get rid of, which I unfortunately know first hand. In fact, that's what prompted me to ditch free anti-virus scanners and pay for Kaspersky instead.

 

[Amaris]

I was getting this kind of thing on a bunch of Google image search links only a couple of days ago. It was always redirecting to the same url though, and I never actually let the page load, but I assume it was that same page template. It seemed that the pages that redirected to it were from the same few domains though, so I don't believe it has anything to do with my computer already being infected, and I ran a manual scan afterwards just to be sure and it was clean. Kaspersky is damn good at blocking crap, and it didn't bleep at me when I clicked the link, so I don't think it had a chance to try anything.

But these fake antivirus scams are getting ridiculous, and they do manage to get past virus scanners, and they can be tricky to get rid of, which I unfortunately know first hand. In fact, that's what prompted me to ditch free anti-virus scanners and pay for Kaspersky instead.

Virus scanners won't catch it unless they also have anti-malware modules, and most don't unless you pay a premium price. If you bought Kaspersky, you're paying $70 a year for something Microsoft Security Essentials + Anti-Malware Bytes will do for free. They'll also take fewer system resources to do it, too.