Criminals on the web are usually always sneaky in their ways, in an effort to obtain certain information on people. A lot of the time its information that can lead to wiping the user’s bank account clean and with the expansion of the web, the methods have become ever more imaginative.
Fake anti-viruses are nothing new, techies everywhere will have likely stumbled across one, once or twice and it appears that the criminals behind such deceptive programs have a new idea up their sleeves.
Sophos, a computer security company that also creates the popular anti-virus, have posted on their blog that a new type of malware that has been found. Essentially it cloaks itself as a legit Microsoft update and one that on the front of it, is rather convincing. As per usual, the first place to look is at grammar errors to try and figure whether it’s real or fake, but it appears the criminals have now gone back to school to learn English grammar and have written a piece of malware that’s somewhat convincing, even to a techie. The use of high quality graphics makes it ever more deceitful as previously it was glaringly obvious of a malwares intentions from the second you came across it.
Strangely however, it only appears to show its face on Firefox’s Windows version, which should ring some alarms as Microsoft Update requires IE.
The Windows 7 scanner and Windows XP explorer scanner that have been around for a while was also hosted on the same website as the Update malware, which honestly makes the time and effort put into this malware completely pointless – how unfortunate for the criminals.
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