WARNING - A New & Very Na$ty Viru$

[spingears]

A New & Very Na$ty Viru$ appears to have appeared on the internet. It arrives by email, locks up every data file on your computer, and advises that you MUST contact a certain web site where you can charge $200 to your credit card and get an email in return which will unlock you files. An engenious scheme and may the perpetrators be hung by the short hair till they dehydrate and dry up into mummies!

Surely there should be some way to recover these files for less than the $200.

Any sugge
stions.

[chaoticbear]

Umm… wtf?

[Mama_Zappa]

True virus, I heard about it yesterday. Here’s one link: http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/11726197.htm

[mhendo]

@chaoticdonkey

Umm… wtf?

Well, you can read the story here. The main gist of it is:

The new ploy was discovered by WebSense, a San Diego based security firm. To get in, the hacker tricks a user into visiting a Web site that downloads a Trojan horse onto a victims machine. If executed, the Trojan searches for all text files on a user’s computer and replaces the text with gibberish.

It will also create a textfile called “Attention!!” which contains instructions on how to unlock a file. “Decoder costs USD 200. Send USD 200 to e-gold account send message about it and I send programm to your e-mail,” the file reads.

But at least some commentators on the wen think that the whole thing is a storm in a teacup:

Associated Press Technology Writer Ted Bridis tries to stir up panic with an alarming story headlined “Hackers Holding Computer Files ‘Hostage’”.

<snip>

This AP story takes an incident that the reporter acknowledges is “isolated,” which was reported by a publicity-seeking security software firm, and tries to turn it into a trend story. He doesn’t bother talking to any independent security researchers and instead interviews spokespeople for three companies that clearly stand to benefit financially from security-based panic.

<snip>

There’s no trend here, folks. It’s one of the most fundamental principles of security: If you let someone else install software on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.

Bridis deserves extra demerits for this lame story.

[glee]

Surely this can’t be true. Everybody knows about real viruses that:

• Bill Gates and Microsoft must be mentioned

• the virus infects when you even look at the e-mail

• there is no protection against it

• you must tell all your friends about this (because it’s not on the news)

[Finagle]

Well, this triggers my BS detector. Just how do the perpetrators intend to access those credit card receipts when what they’re doing is so clearly fraudulent? (I’m not sure exactly what they could be charged with, but it’s close enough to blackmail or a protection racket to make me think that it would violate several statutes.) So there are two problems here. Anyone who had to pay for the password would easily get the charge reversed on their credit card, and the perpetrators could easily be tracked down.

[Balthisar]

@Finagle

Well, this triggers my BS detector. Just how do the perpetrators intend to access those credit card receipts when what they’re doing is so clearly fraudulent?

No, no, no – I’m not making people charge $200 to their credit cards. They simply use Western Union – which can be cash or credit – and I pick it up at any Western Union anonymously. You can’t have the police at EVERY Western Union in the world waiting to pick me up.

Whoever tells that’s it me will lose all of their files, and I won’t accept $200 to give them back.

And if it’s not obvious to some of our mods, no, it’s not really me.

[Chronos]

One could guard against this the same ways one guards against any other virus (be careful what you download, run an updated virus scanner, use a non-Windows machine, etc.). If what the scammers say is true, and they can reverse the damage, then it’s also possible for anyone else who knows how to reverse the damage. If, as is much more likely, they’re lying, and the damage is irreversible, then this is still no worse than any other malware which scrambles a user’s files. In any event, there’s no reason to pay the perpetrators anything, and I would hope that most of the computer-using public would realize that.