It appears that today is anti-malware-day on kkomp.com: So I’ve written a bonus article, because I really do recommend that you use this free software: -

As you may or may not know, I’ve been plagued with viruses over the last few days. Fortunately the infection has now been dealt with; thanks to Microsoft Security Essentials. When I became infected, my antivirus solution provided by Avast! simply didn’t see it. Malwarebytes was oblivious to it also. – Yet there was definitely an infection, as my system was spewing out spam emails to all on my contacts-list, as well as to non-existent addresses that the worm was probing by creating the address itself and seeing if the mail was delivered.

AdAware from Lavasoft managed to find a keylogger, a backdoor Trojan, and the worm itself. I thought that the problem was sorted at that point, and went merrily on my way singing joyfully and blogging crazily. The following day I activated my email client, then switched on the 64-bit box, as well as the external hard-drive. My email inbox was soon swamped by hundreds of “Message Undeliverable” emails. The worm was back!

How? I cleaned both boxes with AdAware, I formatted the external hard-drive, including all the backups, and made a fresh backup. Nevertheless I did it all again, and the system stopped sending spam. I ran 4 different programs on all drives of both machines. All reported that the system was clean. Imagine my horror when two days later the system started sending spam again!

I’d recently been reading an article on PC Mech.com, entitled “Free Anti-Virus From Microsoft Is Now Available”. This gave me an idea: Microsoft earlier dropped its Windows One-Care program, and promised to replace it with something a bit lighter. This was the promised product; just out of beta.

My thinking started to run along the lines of: “Well it’s a new antivirus solution, it’s from Microsoft, it works with Windows 7 64-bit as well as with Windows XP 32-bit; both of which I run, and it’s best of all FREE, which means that it won’t hurt to give it a try. – There’s definitely a problem somewhere on my system that everything I’ve tried so far is missing; so let’s give it a whirl.”

I isolated the box running XP 32-bit, removed Avast! free-edition from it, and installed Microsoft Security Essentials. I set it to auto scan in 1/2-hour . To cut a long story short it found 4 pieces of malware, which it rated as a severe threat, and removed them. Upon reconnection; after I’d isolated the Windows 7 box, having installed Microsoft Security Essential on it, no spam. Yay!

I ran it on the 64-bit Windows 7 box. – It found the culprits: Two instances of Trojan downloaders: ASX.Winmad.AN, and ASX.Winmad.CJ. It deleted the infected files, which had been downloading various malware infections and distributing them over my LAN. – Target neutralised: I’m now virus free.

I can’t speak too highly of Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s a glowingly-excellent piece of software from the softies. Microsoft Security Essentials was the only free antivirus solution that was able to both see and clear the entire virus-infection and fully clean my system. Most other solutions couldn’t see any infection at all, and those that did didn’t get to the root of the issue. Microsoft Security Essentials, however, did the business and completely solved the problem.

After that glowing report, let’s get back to reality with the nitty-gritty: -

Microsoft Security Essentials is extremely thorough: On its default setting it scans everything, and I mean everything. It looks inside zipped archives; personal, program, and system archives, byte by byte: .CAB files and the like are no longer safe places for malware to hide. If it does then it will die by being detected and eradicated bit-by-bit.

Being so thorough; there are obviously limiting factors.

The first of these is time: Microsoft Security Essentials is fast; there’s no doubt about that, but it does so much work that it’s no faster than any other antivirus solution of a similar type. I found that on my box running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 3-core AMD Phenom CPU running at 2.3GHz and 8GBs DDR2 800MHz RAM, Microsoft Security Essentials managed to scan about 50 GBs of data an hour.

The second is heat: With such a colossal amount of calculations being processed at a quite incredible speed, the processor would have a lot of work to do, and therefore produce heat. This antivirus solution, running a full scan, is no laughing matter. I have a feeling that a single-cored processor of 1.8GHz or less would have problems with it. Indeed, from personal experience, I had a lot of programs running at the same time as the full-scan was happening on my AMD Athlon 64×2-powered box, running 32-bit XP Professional at 2.3GHz with 2GBs DDR2 667MHz RAM, and the processor usage went so high for so long that the thermal-trip shut the CPU down before it fried. Running Microsoft Security Essentials on its own caused no such problem though, and the scan was slower than on the 3-core Phenom, but totally effective nevertheless.

As you’ll see from the white CPU-usage graph in the top-left corner of the picture of the readout from Glint system monitor, above, the processor usage can be quite large. This readout was from the Athlon 64×2 XP box with only Microsoft Security Essentials running.

One other thing: If you’re running 64-bit XP; and that’s probably not a lot of you, as 64-bit XP can be a nightmare as far as drivers are concerned, there’s no version of Microsoft Security Essentials for your operating system. Microsoft Security Essentials has versions for 32-bit XP, 32-bit Vista and Windows 7, and 64-bit Vista and Windows 7.

Have you tried out Microsoft Security Essentials yet? If so then what do you think of it?

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“There’s a new trend out there designed to scam computer users: web sites that sell bogus software. Not only does the software not do what it claims to do, but the companies that sell this “software” get a hold of your credit card and can do even more damage to your bank account."

Sunbelt Software , who have exposed a lot of crapware (Rogue software) aimed at the Windows platform, have now at last found crapware aimed at the Mac OSX platform. They know it’s crapware because it’s brought to you by none other than the same people who gave Windows users scareware like Antivirus XP 2008 and XP Antivirus.

There aren’t many malware components aimed at OSX; but the number has seemingly increased by at least 1 recently. However they only found the site itself for the new MacGuard malware program, but were unable to get hold of any program. The site itself appears to have now also been disabled; possibly by Apple themselves?

Macs have appeared relatively untouched by threats for a long time; but now it seems that malicious software targeted at OSX is about to awake Mac users from their sleep of complacency. Previously in March of this year, 2008, a Mac security site, Macvirus.org, with a forum full of links to malware which targets Apple computers; the RSPlug-Gen trojan in particular, as well as the Zlobar-Fam trojan for distribution to PCs running Windows. They were posing as fake codecs supposedly needed to view a non-existent pornographic film of Britney Spears.

There are a number of ways of looking at this: Either you could say every virus targeted at a Mac is one less virus targeted at Windows (Aren’t there enough already?), or you could say that those people who use alternative operating systems to Windows aren’t as safe as they might imagine; and their complacency could be their downfall at the end of the day.

What do you think? Do non-Windows users need to bother with anti-malware programs?

Have you ever visited a site and been redirected straight to a page saying something like:

“WARNING! Your computer is infected! Our initial scans have detected a possible malware infestation on your computer. Click here for a free full scan.”

So this advertiser is claiming to have scanned my files without my permission and found malware? Alarm-bells sound straight away. Whether I click “Scan Now” or “Cancel” their alleged malware scanner begins working: Clever that, as there’s no internet communication as such during this “scan”; and the only thing that’s been loaded onto my computer is a Flash animation.

Before I can think clearly the “in-depth scan” is over and reports that I have X amount of trojans and Y amount of other malicious programs on my PC! Wow: The only way that they could have got on there is if the advertiser had just put them there. I cancel the page and run a malware scan using XoftSpySE. The scan reveals 10 low-risk spyware cookies; at least 6 of which were put there by this advert. The Ad goes on to tell me that I should pay for their software which can find malware that other programs can’t…

Years ago I once downloaded a program called “Spyware Nuker” which used advertising tactics just like this, onto a clean install of Windows 98SE on a new hard-drive which I’d formatted in FAT32 that day. This HD had never been exposed to the internet before then but Spyware Nuker found oodles of malware and claimed it had fixed all of the problems. I uninstalled Spyware Nuker and ran Ad-Aware free edition – It found a trojan and loads of spyware that Spyware Nuker had planted on my system.

My guess is that the program you’re now considering downloading will do much the same. Here’s what actually happened:-

The URL that you typed redirected your browser to the advertiser’s URL, where the ad including a small flash animation and a few spyware cookies were loaded up to your HD. The “Scan Now/Cancel” panel was overall linked to a single link, which told the flash animation to run. After it had run, feigning a scanner GUI, the window uploaded a few names of various malware components at random from a database on the server and displayed them as infections on your computer.

The intention was for you to say

“OMG I have these infections that my current antispyware missed – What a clever piece of software! I must buy it now.”

Probably when you purchase it it’ll upload all those infections to your computer along with some others, it’ll then eradicate the infections it says it found, leaving you with the others it wasn’t supposed to find: Now you have a compromised system that is at the mercy of whoever has paid the highest price for use of your new bot – And worst of all if you’re not that computer-savvy, you’ll never know anything about it unless your ISP contacts you with a complaint.

Advice: If you ever see an Ad appear telling you that your computer is infected; close the page or ignore it – Don’t even bother with it. You might try telling the webmaster of the site that you intended to visit about this; as the webmaster may be unaware that their new advertising that they’ve just signed up for is run by unethical enterprise.

Remember, on the internet; if it sounds too good to be true then it is: 999 out of 1000 times there’s no “probably” about it.  If several reputable programs find no spyware, then one that you’ve never heard of informs you that your computer is infested; it’s fairly safe to assume that you’re being conned; especially if that program is over-hasty to grab your business at all costs.

Some advertising does have a funny side though:

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Seriously now:

*Shazza recommends*

XoftSpySE Anti-Spyware

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