WARNING! Really sneaky virus attack I saw today...

[mitchellvii]

Was just cruising around the web today and it appeared that a Microsoft Essentials Virus Warning popped up on my screen. It named a virus, and adware and a trojan that had been detected and prompted me to run a clean on them with the typical Microsoft Essentials Virus Popup Dialog provided.

But the trick was this wasn't a Microsoft Essentials Warning at all, simply a fake one in the browser window. God only knows what horrors would have happened if I had clicked that. I closed the browser window and ran a REAL virus scan. Guess what, no viruses.

Now I, and I'm sure most of us in here are are sophisticated enough not to fall for anything like this; but how about your less wary friends and relatives? This looked very real and could fool a lot of people. Maybe this has been around for a long time but I'm online all day every day and it's the first time I've seen this one using Microsoft Essentials. Warn your friends.

 

[ZachBui]

thanks for the info. Glad nothing bad happened to you

 

[mitchellvii]

thanks for the info. Glad nothing bad happened to you

Well, let me put it this way. I see these things all the time and this one was so good I almost clicked it out of reflex.

 

[pallentx]

Yeah, the fake antivirus has been around a while in different forms. Luckily, since Windows 7, most of these infections are contained to a single user profile. Some people actually went to jail over one of the fake antivirus scams a while back. Fake antivirus software scheme results in four year jail sentence | The Verge

Another nice thing about RT - as far as I know it has not attracted the attention of malware writers yet.

 

[jnjroach]

I don't need to worry about this on my Surface RT has it infects x86 based Win32 binaries :starstruck:

 

[Arizona Willie]

I had the same thing happen when I went to the Microsoft forums today!!

But I knew it was fake because there is no way it can scan my computer in 3 seconds.
I bailed out of there and then I did a complete scan with my Avast and suprisingly it did find two in Microsoft temp files.
I suspect they might have been put there by that pop up fake scan.

But it took Avast 1 1/2 hours to scan my entire system with over 1 tb of data scanned.
Of course just scanning C drive would only take about 20minutes.
But when that popup said it had scanned my system I knew that was IMPOSSIBLE.

Besides that I don't have Microsoft Essentials on my system. So that makes it pretty hard for that program to have done what they said it did.

 

[mitchellvii]

I had the same thing happen when I went to the Microsoft forums today!!

But I knew it was fake because there is no way it can scan my computer in 3 seconds.
I bailed out of there and then I did a complete scan with my Avast and suprisingly it did find two in Microsoft temp files.
I suspect they might have been put there by that pop up fake scan.

But it took Avast 1 1/2 hours to scan my entire system with over 1 tb of data scanned.
Of course just scanning C drive would only take about 20minutes.
But when that popup said it had scanned my system I knew that was IMPOSSIBLE.

Besides that I don't have Microsoft Essentials on my system. So that makes it pretty hard for that program to have done what they said it did.

That's what was so deceptive about the pop-up I got. It happened when I was visiting a well-established site I have been to hundreds of times. Somehow they are causing this to launch when you go to trusted sites. Weird.

 

[Arizona Willie]

I'm wondering if they have managed to put a hidden virus ON my computer that is doing this or if it has been embedded in websites.
It happened again later yesterday on another site. Same popup.
This time I didn't hit the x in the corner I close the entire browser immediately.

That's what was so deceptive about the pop-up I got. It happened when I was visiting a well-established site I have been to hundreds of times. Somehow they are causing this to launch when you go to trusted sites. Weird.

 

[mitchellvii]

I'm wondering if they have managed to put a hidden virus ON my computer that is doing this or if it has been embedded in websites.
It happened again later yesterday on another site. Same popup.
This time I didn't hit the x in the corner I close the entire browser immediately.

Yeah make sure you do a deep scan and not just the quick virus scan.

 

[Arizona Willie]

Heh heh heh, I've run deep scans, boot times scans, and booted into Safe Mode and ran a scan.
Everything < seems > clear but .....

 

[johninsj]

I love it when I see those when browsing on my Linux box.

 

[Arizona Willie]

Enjoy

You are lucky that you run an OS that hardly anyone wants to mess with.
Not enough users for the virus people to bother writing a virus for your system.