Dave Keays is an independent web programmer specializing in Drupal and the security of Drupal. In addition to web developing He keeps track of trends on the Internet.
Jan
11
Don’t be Scared
ByThe use of fake anti-viruses or fake anti-spyware programs (aka scareware) was covered in IBM report on Internet security trends for 2008. But what is this thing called scareware and what do you do when you run into it?
Let’s say you were surfing the web and suddenly a pop-up screen told you that your computer was scanned, 573 infections were found, and it gave you a button to clean them up. But then you notice a statement that they accept Visa or MasterCard. Chances are you just ran into a fake Anti-Malware (Anti-Virus or Anti-Spyware).
But don’t think it is only in the realm of Anti-Malware. This tactic is also used by fake “registry cleaners”. They claim your system has a corrupted registry and offer to clean it for you; for a price.
The last thing you want to do is let that program “clean” your system. If you are lucky all you have been duped into buying a program that doesn’t work as advertised. But if you ran into something like “SpySheriff”, it will infect your computer instead of clean your computer. Even that is not as bad as some of the other possibilities. (See the Redmond article referenced below.)
When you get a pop-up that seems to be trying to scare you like that, stop. Many of those programs will activate when you hit the ‘cancel’ or ‘no’ button. There are even some that start when you hit the close button on the upper right side of the window. Instead you’ll need to do something technical behind the scenes and stop the program from running.
On a Window machine press the ALT, the CTRL, and the DEL button at the same time (the infamous “three finger salute”) and click “end task”. On a Mac press command, option, Q, Esc, and “force quit”.
The February 19th, 2009 edition of the Redmond Magazine has an article about scareware that includes details of how a fire department got their hard disk erased (it went to “alphabet heaven” were the words used) and hours of power-point demonstrations of rescue techniques were lost. Tom Mullally (division chief and IT manager for Evergreen Park Fire Department) said to Chicago residents: “The next time you dial 911 … you should hope they studied the lessons that were … lost to immature and criminal actions”.
