Potent New Cyber-Threats Threaten Productivity & Privacy
By Doug Edelman (01/08/06)
In the last few weeks, the online world has suddenly gotten much more dangerous - kinda like a Cyber-AIDS epidemic! ( See my recent article at http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=11307 ). One of the worst out there is the Beovins Trojan which, once it infects you, searches out and downloads numerous ADDITIONAL very nasty Trojans like SmitFraud, QuickNavigate, SpySheriff, Winstall, etc. All of these are very stealthy and difficult to remove. Some will disable your Antivirus, AntiSpyware, and even your Firewall. Most of the victims of this pest are people who visit porn and file sharing sites.
Going to file sharing sites such as KazAa, Morpheus, LimeWire, P2P Network etc are much like taking a daily trip down to the red light district for a little unprotected action! You may pick up something you don't want while you're getting some that you might want.
Beovins (the one that opens the doors WIDE) is often installed by the victim being enticed to view some video with a "cool" description and a link. Clicking that link starts what appears to be your media player... but instead of playing a video it gives a message "unable to play video - download needed codec here". Unfortunately, the "VideoCodec" is actually the bug. From that point on, you have two choices... invest in numerous hours of a very knowledgeable IT Professional's time or wipe the drive and start over! "Free" downloads of music and other files aren't so "free" when you must invest serious jack in repairing your machine, or when you must lose EVERYTHING to a Hard Drive reformat and rebuild.
Symptoms of such an infection will be the takeover of your background wallpaper with a text box warning that your are infected with spyware, a continuous popup in the lower right corner appearing to be a System Alert warning of spyware detected, and multiple popup windows telling you to start scans. (If you fall for any of these and click the links, you'll get even FURTHER infected!) Popups will then make being productively online virtually impossible.
Go to http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/virus.aspx?ID=43272 to see a screenshot of such an infected machine, and read further info.
In addition, once infected, the machine is completely open to remote control and inspection by the hacker. Privacy is gone... and identity theft is a distinct possibility.
Copyright © 2005 by Doug Edelman
(Printer friendly version) Email: Doug Edelman
