Sneaky Bastard

I was logged in to Skype a couple days ago. While I was away from the computer, it received an instant message from a user “Security Center ®” with an important message:

I never use Skype for IM, so this was immediately flagged as bullshit before I read the content. Note that my computer is an Apple Power Mac G5 running Mac OS X — Microsoft® Windows® hath not touched this machine. Yet, somehow, this helpful message informs me that they’ve detected that my “system IS affected.” I viewed the user profile to see what other humorous bits of information I could glean:

Well, I guess the phishing script couldn’t be bothered to fill out the form completely. But just for fun, I decided to go to the website link from the message. It was only running for a couple days before somebody shut it down, but I was able to see a somewhat convincing “scan” of my “Windows System Files.” What do you know, my computer was “infected” with several cryptic Windows viruses. The good news is that the website offered FREE software to remove them. Well, isn’t that sweet.

I’m wary of giving these phishing kids any credit, but the Flash animation that simulated a running local program was done pretty well. I can see how a novice computer user would be suckered into installing whatever spyware/trojan/virus/rootkit the site had to offer. It’s no wonder that most computer experts estimate that there are more than 100 million compromised Windows computers sitting on the net, most being commanded by bot herders to launch attacks and send spam.