Tech: Rules Changed for Malware Removal

06 Feb 13 - 06:53 PM (#3476545)
Subject: Tech: Rules Changed for Malware Removal
From: JohnInKansas

Symantec and Microsoft have announced that they obtained a court order and shut down servers controlling as many as a million "bot" computers taken over by a cyber crime ring.

WHAT IS CHANGED is that the servers were used to send a notice to all the infected machines.

An attempt to search on the web using an infected machine will take you to a server with the message:

"You have reached this website because your computer is very likely to be infected by malware that redirects the results of your search queries. You will receive this notification until you remove the malware from your computer."

Since this message resembles the popups used by some criminal malware distributors to try to get you to let them install malware on your computer, and everyone by now surely knows YOU NEVER RESPOND to a message like this, it would be easy to disregard the notice and/or to go to a lot of trouble trying to get your machine cleaned up by yourself.

The news report isn't clear about what you should do next, but does say that Microsoft and Symantec will provide free cleanup tools.

Pending clarification, my suggestion would be that you go directly to either symantec.com or microsoft.com and look for help there.

The rule that you don't do anything with any message of this kind at the site where it appears probably still applies. The difference is that this message, if you see it at the site set up for this one infection, IS REAL, and you do need to do some cleanup.


The full news report is at:

Microsoft, Symantec disrupt huge cyber ring

John

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06 Feb 13 - 09:58 PM (#3476590)
Subject: RE: Tech: Rules Changed for Malware Removal
From: GUEST,leeneia

thanks for the info, John.

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