{"id":974,"date":"2008-11-19T13:28:52","date_gmt":"2008-11-19T12:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=974"},"modified":"2008-12-04T00:00:35","modified_gmt":"2008-12-03T23:00:35","slug":"antivirus-2009-seems-to-doing-the-rounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=974","title":{"rendered":"Antivirus 2009 seems to be doing the rounds…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A colleague brought his XP-based laptop into the office today. Through a quirk of fate, Antivirus 2009 had managed to install itself. It’s a pretty swish looking piece of malware that looks very much like leading anti-virus programs, even giving you the feel-good factor that it has found infected files and has cleaned them for you. It is, of course, a confidence trick, smoke and mirrors<\/a>. <\/p>\n

It’s most likely to have come from the same stable as WinAntivirus did, as noted here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I’m repeating myself, however my advice is simple: if a web page pops up a dialog box telling you that your computer is infected and offers a free clean-up, ignore it. Never install software that offers itself via a web page pop-up, go to a reputable download site (ideally a vendor site) and download from there. <\/p>\n

Or, if you are in any doubt, use a search engine to get some more information. Here’s what Google returns<\/a> for Antivirus 2009 and here’s what Live Search returns<\/a>. These result should be the first clue that Antivirus 2009 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.<\/p>\n

I still promote the use of these tools for cleaning up: Crap Cleaner<\/a>, Spybot<\/a> and HijackThis<\/a>. <\/p>\n

[Update 03\/12\/2008]<\/strong>
\nAs part of this infection Spybot discovered Win32.TDSS, which includes a rather invasive rootkit. I used ComboFix.exe and Smitfraudfix.exe<\/a> as discussed over in the Spybot forums<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: Antivirus 2009<\/a>, Smitfraud<\/a>, Smitfraudfix<\/a>, ComboFix<\/a>, ComboFix.exe<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A colleague brought his XP-based laptop into the office today. Through a quirk of fate, Antivirus 2009 had managed to install itself. It’s a pretty swish looking piece of malware that looks very much like leading anti-virus programs, even giving you the feel-good factor that it has found infected files and has cleaned them for … Continue reading Antivirus 2009 seems to be doing the rounds…<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[221,222],"class_list":["post-974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security","tag-antivirus-2009","tag-confidence-tricks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=974"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":994,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions\/994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}