Category Archives: adware

Software designed either to (1) display ads to the computer user, or (2) load ad pages in the background, using the victim’s resources to do so. (see also: clickfraud)

Epic Malware Dropper Makes No Attempt to Hide

September 21, 2010 – 3:09 pm

By Andrew Brandt In the world of first-person shooter games, getting the most headshots – hits on the opponent which instantly take the opponent’s avatar out of the game — is a prized goal. The headshot is the quickest way to dispatch a foe in virtually every shooter, which is why the file name of [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Ad-clickers, Backdoors, Blackhat SEO, Destructive behavior, Downloaders, Keyloggers, social engineering, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Trojans | Leave a Comment

Blog Comment Spam Points to Drive-By Site

July 9, 2010 – 3:07 pm

By Andrew Brandt I just want to take a moment to thank the malware author who posted a spam comment to the Webroot Threat Blog blog the other day. You guys make my job so easy. The spam comment, which reads Hello. I the beginner. I wish to show to you,scandal story and links to [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Destructive behavior, Downloaders, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (6)

Modified Websites Pushing Trojans On the Rise

April 21, 2010 – 10:46 am

By Andrew Brandt For the past couple of weeks, owners of Web sites have been hit with a wave of attacks that surreptitiously infect unsuspecting visitors with a wide variety of malware types. The first wave inflicted rogue antivirus on unlucky victims, but late last week victims who visited infectious sites were redirected into a [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Blackhat SEO, Destructive behavior, Rogue Security Products, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (1)

Fakealerts: Building a Better Mousetrap

November 25, 2009 – 10:48 am

By Andrew Brandt In general, the use of fakealerts – those bogus warnings that look like your PC has started some sort of antivirus scan on its own, then predict imminent doom if you don’t buy some snake oil product right this minute — is on the rise. Fakealerts constitute a particularly effective social engineering [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Blackhat SEO, Rogue Security Products, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (7)

Rogues Mug Big Bird on his Birthday

November 4, 2009 – 12:48 pm

By Andrew Brandt In a move sure to raise the ire of Sesame Street fans everywhere, the black hat SEO gangs that have been manipulating Google results for the better part of the year have seized on a new target from which they’ve launched their current salvo of rogue antivirus guano. That’s right, the lovable, [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Blackhat SEO, Rogue Security Products, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks | Comments (1)

Trojan Decodes Captchas Using Stolen Commercial Tools

October 2, 2009 – 12:38 pm

By Andrew Brandt A new Trojan quietly circulating in the wild uses components from a commercial optical character recognition (OCR) application to decode captchas, those jumbled-text images meant to help a website discern human activity from automated bots. The OCR-using captcha breaking tool is just one component of the Trojan. Its main purpose appears to [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Keyloggers, Phishing Trojans, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (4)

Rogues Impersonate Google, Firefox Security Alerts

August 7, 2009 – 4:01 pm

By Andrew Brandt In the past week, we’ve begun to see new fakealerts — those disturbingly effective, entirely bogus “virus warning” messages — that appear to impersonate the appearance and text of legitimate warning dialogs you might see while surfing with the Firefox browser, or searching Google. The dialog, in a stern, red dialog box [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Rogue Security Products, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (13)

More Malware Trades on Tawdry Searches

July 23, 2009 – 11:51 am

By Andrew Brandt By now, you’ve most likely heard about how an ESPN reporter was victimized, and that a surreptitiously recorded video was distributed online. You may also have read that malware distributors were taking advantage of the high level of interest in this video to rapidly disseminate malware by convincing people to click links to [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Blackhat SEO, Rogue Security Products, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (3)

AutoCAD Adware Trojans Target Techies

July 1, 2009 – 8:52 am

By Andrew Brandt Every once in a while, you hear whispers or rumors about specially-crafted, targeted malware designed to steal a specific piece of data from a particular victim. The data thieves, in these limited cases, tend to be clever, thoughtful, and methodical in both the creation and deployment of their creations. Rarely do malware [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (7)
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