Yekrats.com: Scotto’s Seafud Shanty

This past week I helped a friend get rid of a nasty trojan/virus on her computer that I thought I’d warn you about. It’s called “Antivirus 360″.

The beast is a nasty, nasty thing. If you click on a bad weblink (”Your computer is infected… do you want to remove the infection?” or somesuch.) the nasty bugger will dig its claws into your Windows system and never let go. Here’s some of the things it does.

• It redirects all web traffic away from sites that might be used to eradicate it. So if you find a handy Google reference, you will not be able to access it. It will forward you to its own advertising site.
• You won’t be able to install tools downloaded from the aforementioned sites (downloaded from another computer, that is) that could help cure your computer.
• It removes the tabs from the top of the Task Manager, so you can’t look at the processes, so you can cancel it. (I was never able to find it.)
• It stops Windows System Restore from working, making it so you can’t roll your computer back to before the infection happened.
• After I *reinstalled* Windows (albeit with a “Quick format”) Windows told me it couldn’t install to that partition because it had errors. A deletion of the partition and full format cured it, though.
• None of the virus scanners I use seemed to notice that anything was wrong. :-/
• And the kicker: It pops up “alerts” every 30 seconds telling you your computer is infected and advertises that you need to lay down $30 to get this special scanner to disinfect it. (ie: Criminal extortion.)

I had to format the stupid computer (twice) to kill it. Bleh.

An ounce of prevention for this thing would be to use a beefed-up HOSTS file. I’ve been using one for a couple of years, and it seems to help a lot. (It also has the side benefit of making annoying ads come up blank.) I found this site which gives aHOSTS file I use, and the latest version blocks this Antivirus 360 thing. You simply copy an ordinary text file into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\ changing the name HOSTS.txt to just HOSTS (without the file extension).

However, one downside to a beefy HOSTS file is, it *really* blocks advertisers, even if you happen to be interested in something. For example, occasionally there’s a text-ad in Google that I’d really like to see. Well, you can’t really get there by clicking on the ad. If you really want some kind of ad, you can delete its listing in the HOSTS file, or you can copy the URL from the link and cut out the parts going to the advertiser, leaving the parts going to the advertisee.

So, do yourself a favor, if you run Windows: get yourself a HOSTS file.

I saw this on Facebook and thought I’d pass it along. It’s certainly not safe for work, or children, but I laughed out loud anyway…

When Your Credit Card Signature Fun Backfires

(or… “Advice: Don’t Draw Genitalia As Your Signature When Paying Via Credit Card”.)