"Rogue security software (or rogueware) is a form of computer malware that deceives or misleads users into paying for the fake or simulated removal of malware, or that installs other malware. Rogue security software, in recent years (2008–2011), has become a growing and serious security threat in desktop computing."
There have been many different variations of this rogue virus that I have seen over the past several years. One thing about it is that it keeps evolving each time I see it. Lately the changes I have seen have been making it harder and harder to just fix and it takes me a longer amount of time to fix all the changes it makes in order to convince you that something is wrong with your computer.
One of the things I have seen it do lately is hide all your personal documents, hide all the program files (when you click on start and then go to programs) so you can not run any programs, it has also hidden all the icons on the background screen. On top of this the Rogue virus pops up looking like a normal Anti virus program displaying a ton of trojans, spyware, malware on your computer. This version also started popping up warnings stating that the hard drive was failing, had bad sectors and corrupt files.
This last Rogue virus I received was called "Windows XP Recovery" it looks like this
It can look like a normal every day Anti virus program but its not. The following is some examples of how this can happen to you.
Rogue security software mainly relies on social engineering (fraud) in order to defeat the security built into modern operating system and browser software and install itself onto victims' computers. A website may, for example, display a fictitious warning dialog stating that someone's machine is infected, and encourage them through social engineering to install or purchase scareware.
Most have a Trojan horse component, which users are misled into installing. The Trojan may be disguised as:
- A browser plug-in or extension (typically toolbar)
- An image, screen saver or archive file attached to an e-mail message
- Multimedia codex required to play a certain video clip
- Software shared on peer-to-peer networks
- A free online malware scanning service
More recently, malware distributors have been utilizing SEO poisoning techniques by pushing infected URLs to the top of search engine results about recent news events. People looking for articles on such events on a search engine may encounter results that, upon being clicked, are instead redirected through a series of sites before arriving at a landing page that says that their machine is infected and pushes a download to a "trial" of the rogue program. A 2010 study by Google found 11,000 domains hosting fake anti-virus software, accounting for 50% of all malware delivered via internet advertising.
So, what this means is when you do a search via Google.com (I don't suggest any other) before you click on a link that shows up after a search, don't just click on the first thing you see listed, look at the address it shows below it, if it does not look right then look at the other links to see if maybe the one you were looking for is the right one. Sure there maybe other ways of this Rogue virus to get into your system but we just have to watch what we are doing as we peruse through the internet.
I am not a writer so I am sorry if some of this doesn't make sense I just needed a place to explain things that won't fit on facebook (limited to 420 characters) so I am going to post stuff here.
Chris Long
http://www.thelocalgeeks.com
http://www.facebook.com/thelocalgeeks
http://twitter.com/#!/thelocalgeeks
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