A non-OSNews-reader asks: "I've got 5 PCs that I'm trying to use to train disadvantaged young people. The problem is they are riddled with viruses and a firewall blocks me from updating them. The people in charge of maintaining the
PCs won't fix them or give me the admin password (Win XP) to let me
install a new or updated antivirus. The centre is being shut down in a
few months. If they were working, I could still do a lot with them, so I've been
looking for a good online virus scan - but they all try to download a
little .exe onto your PC first, and the settings on the PCs won't
allow that. Suggestions? Solutions? Links?" Read on for our recommendation. Update: It appears that this question is part of an elaborate email scam designed to propagate malware. See here for details.
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Member since:2006-01-27
Yep. Spam. And OS News fell for it.
Google for the first few sentences of the message in quotes. You'll see this has been posted word-for-word dozens of times on online forums.
"I've got 5 PCs that I'm trying to use to train disadvantaged young people. The problem is they are riddled with viruses and a firewall blocks me from updating them. The people in charge of maintaining the PCs won't fix them or give me the admin password (Win XP) to let me install a new or updated antivirus. "
Member since:1997-10-01
It actually kind of makes my day to find out that I fell for an elaborate spam scheme. I still think that this made a pretty good Ask OSNews topic, though, because I can't tell you how many people I know have computers that barely work because of malware, and operating systems are such a mystery to them that they don't feel empowered to do anything about it. I thought that the advice that the readers gave was knowledgeable, creative, and helpful.
The reason I'm so happy to have been taken in by this scam is that it's been a very long time since I've seen an email-based scam that wasn't totally transparent to me. Posting an earnest-sounding query to an online forum intending to go back and suggest a malware-infected download to trick other people is really a quite brilliant idea. I guess it just goes to show you, just because someone on the internet says to do something, that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Member since:
2009-06-03
I received the exact same email through a mailing list I subscribe to. This list is fairly small, and the sender was a new member.
Several people replied with suggestions.
Suddenly, out of the blue, another new member popped up, and suggested some unknown online scanner.
Since I run Linux, I checked it out without worries.
That "online scanner" showed right away an animation of a scan running on my machine, within seconds, and showed me several infections in my C;, D;, and Windows system folder.
Since I run Linux, that's just absolutely impossible, of course.
Then it suggested I download a file "OnlineScan345346.exe", and very helpfully proceeded to open the download request for me.
It's a trojan, and a very new and nasty one at that. I have downloaded already 2 variants of it from the same place on 2 different computers. I have submitted them to Avira (which is what I use on Windows), and hopefully it will become better known soon.
That said, advice on cleaning viruses is always welcome, so the discussions on this article are useful for a lot of people anyway. So no harm done, unless you clicked on the second fake mailing list member's advice.
My advice for this is to use the Avira Rescue CD:
http://www.free-av.com/en/products/12/avira_antivir_rescue_system.h...
F-Secure also makes a really good rescue CD:
http://www.f-secure.com/linux-weblog/