UK PC Users Hit By Huge Fake Antivirus Attack 75
An anonymous reader writes "UK Internet users were on the receiving end of a large drive-by web attack at the end of February, which attempted to push fake antivirus at least 750,000 times on a single day alone, security company AVG has said. According to a company analysis, on Sunday 27 February, detection levels for the previously obscure Russian 'Blackhole' exploit kit suddenly spiked to 900,000 globally from a few tens of thousands that would be typical for such kits, before dropping back again. Unusually, almost 750,000 of these detections were for UK PCs, which offers a baseline for what must have been a sustained attack several times that size against mainstream web servers frequented by users in the country."
Re:Computers not fun anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Computers not fun anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
I like to fiddle with computers as much as anyone else, but oddly enjoy having an iPhone that just does and is locked down. So perhaps the way forward is to ship products that are, by default, locked up tighter than an iPhone but with the option to incrementally relax restrictions. This way the average user who couldn't care less about what is going on under the hood and is susceptible to drive-by attacks is fairly safe. But then those who would like to fiddle and are probably a lot more security conscious have the freedom they need. I also think that continual updates don't help much. The average user does just want a machine that they can use to browse the internet, type the odd letter, and so on. Continually pushing new versions of this and that gets them into the habit of updating and installing stuff they don't understand. It might be better to encourage these people to take their machine in for a regular service to someone who knows what they are doing, same as a car.
Re:Fake AV loaded on Mac OS systems on 14 occasion (Score:4, Interesting)
They largely are. These offers of protection tend to download .EXE's since these fake antivirus companies don't waste time on anything that's non-Windows. In addition, a large majority of Mac users don't bother with Antivirus so they simply ignore these. Last but not least, they tend to be less gullible than Windows users.
http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and-software/networking/news/218521 [daniweb.com]
http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/10/microsoft-users-gullible-advertising/ [techcrunch.com]
Last but not least, these types of attacks tend to be fear driven and Windows users simply have more to fear from Viruses than Mac users at the moment. After years of sustained attacks, they are simply much to jumpy and easily frightened to pass up.