Just a word of warning…!!!
The lovely missus this afternoon called out that there was "some Virus Alert thingy on the computer screen" and did I want to sort it out? Being as bright as she is she knew that one thing you don’t do is to run any download that you didn’t initiate yourself?
Natalie had simply been trying to find a recipe on the Internet that she had just seen on a cooking show. It looks like as part of viewing that website the *proported* scanning process kicked in claiming that I was infected by 3 "high risk" viruses and offered to disinfect my Computer if I clicked on OK - not surprisingly it is not possible to actually cancel this installation - the only way to halt the install/scan at this point would appear to be to use Task Manager to kill IExplorer?
I must say that this looked pretty convincing, and it would not surprise me in the slightest that this would be getting a lot of success out in the wild with most average users
Now just for those of you that think this is all a bit too much and this stuff doesn’t happen much at all, have a look at some of the details from Google’s Online Security Blog as noted by ITnews
"It has been 18 months since we started to identify web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. pages that attempt to exploit visitors by installing and running malware automatically," the Google blog stated yesterday.
"During that time we have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 sites automatically installing malware."
Google’s team also reported that around two per cent of malicious websites are delivering malware via advertising.
So even at 2% of sites that means that if you only browse to 7 sites a day then there is a good chance you have been infected that week? Scary thought?
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