Hoaxes and Trojans – still?

David Dorn wonders what it is about computers that makes their owners feel invulnerable, yet paranoid over some completely daft things!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure warning all your friends about a particularly malicious scam is a good thing – it’s the stuff that many local radio programs are based on. But sometimes it pays to think a little before blithely forwarding a scam message on to everybody in your address book.

For instance, this little beauty dropped into one of my mailboxes the other day:

Received from a friend who has a friend in Surrey Police

Beware the next time you use an ATM

Criminals are inventing ever more ingenious methods of relieving you of your cash.

The latest scam involves thieves putting a thin, clear, rigid plastic 'sleeve' into the ATM card slot. When you insert your card, the machine can't read the strip, so it keeps asking you to re-enter your PIN number.

Meanwhile, someone behind you watches as you tap in your number.

Eventually you give up, thinking the machine has swallowed your card and you walk away.

The thieves then remove the plastic sleeve complete with card, and empty your account. The way to avoid this is to run your finger along the card slot before you put your card in. The sleeve has a couple of tiny prongs that the thieves need to get the sleeve out of the slot, and you'll be able to feel them.

The police would like as many people as possible to be aware of this scam, so pass this on to your friends.

Now, had the friend that forwarded this to me put his brain into gear, he’d have realised that this is a complete hoax. When you use an ATM, you slide you card so far into the slot, and then a little roller mechanism inside takes over and “sucks” the card in.

If there was indeed a plastic sleeve waiting to cover the card, the card could not be sucked in – but obviously a great many people have been! It’s a hoax – and quite an old one. The problem is, it’s an ideal vehicle for the malicious to piggy back a Trojan or virus onto – once you’re received a couple of copies of it, you’ll not be so vigilant, and you could become infected.

Indeed, as far as clogging up the Internet is concerned, it really doesn’t need to carry any nasties – gullible folks forwarding it off to fifty or sixty other folks at a time will soon cause congestion.

And then there’s Klez

Klez

I see by my news feeds that Klez-H is by far the most widely occurring email-borne virus for April, infecting and affecting hundreds of thousands of computers all over the world. The thing is, it shouldn’t be able to! In terms of detection, 99% of Anti-Virus companies have had all variants of Klez  in their update files for simply ages – since January, in some cases (and for some variants, admittedly).

But here again, folks must either not be using an Anti-Virus (A-V) program, or simply don’t bother to keep it up to date – which, frankly, is a bit daft. It’s not as if you’ve actually got to part with any money, either – AVG Anti-Virus, for instance, is available from our download libraries here and costs absolutely nothing. What’s more, if you let it, it will keep your detection files completely up to date for you.

So quite how Klez is still growing and infecting more and more PCs is beyond me. On the one hand we have people paranoid about being ripped off in ways that cannot happen, and believing every bit of junk they’re sent about it, and yet when they should paranoid about malicious code, they’re not!

As my old gran used to say, there’s nowt as queer as folk!

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David Dorn