WARNING: New virus pretends to sue you for copyright violations!

Postby **Mithrandir** » Tue Apr 13, 2010 3:10 pm

Hey everyone,

I ran across this and thought I'd give you all a heads up. I'm guessing most of you probably don't participate in illegal filesharing activities, but if you have friends that do, send them the link below. It looks like there's a new bit of malware out there that hijacks your web browser and pretends to represent an organization that will sue you for copyright infringement - unless you "settle now" for only $400.00. This is absolutely a scam, and you should not click on anything associated with a notices like this!!! It will even scan your computer for .torrent files in order to find "evidence" to make its case more credible.

More information available via wired magazine:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/ransomware/

If you see this, be sure to run some credible anti-virus/anti-malware software!

- Mith

Postby **Shao Feng-Li** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 7:25 am

Creepy. Thanks for the heads up.

Postby **Alcuinus** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 10:38 am

Wow... but I don't use torrents so HA!

Postby **Ante Bellum** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 12:31 pm

Yeah, glad I don't use torrents. I don't know anybody who does actually.

Postby **Mithrandir** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 8:07 pm

I use torrents frequently to quickly download the latest disc images of free software such as the latest CentOS, Fedora or Ubuntu.

Postby **Valkaiser** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 10:11 pm

Indeed, they work great for slow/intermittent connections as well. GNU/Linux DVD install images would be near impossible for me to get otherwise.

Postby **TGJesusfreak** » Tue Apr 20, 2010 11:39 am

Thanks for the warning Mith! Dude, people like this make me sad. Making a virus to get money

Postby **RefractedAhav** » Wed Apr 21, 2010 7:49 pm

thank's for the update. Which platforms does this effect? I had a win virus attempt to infect my linux laptop once. It wanted me to download and install their .exe. Some of these things are just too obvious.

Postby **Straylight** » Wed Apr 28, 2010 7:05 am

My university latop got hit by this despite having up to date antivirus software installed. I think it must have got in via some unpatched vulnerability or something. I tried running the antivirus software on it, which sort of removed all the crap, but then it popped back up again after a few seconds/minutes.

Postby **Mithrandir** » Sat May 01, 2010 6:05 am

Have you tried any of the pre-boot AV packages? Krebs on Security had a good article on this a while back...

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/03/removing-viruses-from-a-pc-that-wont-boot/

My apologies if I already posted that to you - I sometimes forget who I've linked what to. XD

WARNING: New virus pretends to sue you for copyright violations!

WARNING: New virus pretends to sue you for copyright violations!

Who is online

Loading