CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Hey everyone,

I ran across this and thought I'd give you all a heads up. I'm guessing most of you probably don't participate in illegal filesharing activities, but if you have friends that do, send them the link below. It looks like there's a new bit of malware out there that hijacks your web browser and pretends to represent an organization that will sue you for copyright infringement - unless you "settle now" for only $400.00. This is absolutely a scam, and you should not click on anything associated with a notices like this!!! It will even scan your computer for .torrent files in order to find "evidence" to make its case more credible.

More information available via wired magazine:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/ransomware/

If you see this, be sure to run some credible anti-virus/anti-malware software!

- Mith

Creepy. Thanks for the heads up.

Wow... but I don't use torrents so HA!

Yeah, glad I don't use torrents. I don't know anybody who does actually.

I use torrents frequently to quickly download the latest disc images of free software such as the latest CentOS, Fedora or Ubuntu.

Indeed, they work great for slow/intermittent connections as well. GNU/Linux DVD install images would be near impossible for me to get otherwise.

Thanks for the warning Mith! Dude, people like this make me sad. Making a virus to get money

thank's for the update. Which platforms does this effect? I had a win virus attempt to infect my linux laptop once. It wanted me to download and install their .exe. Some of these things are just too obvious.

My university latop got hit by this despite having up to date antivirus software installed. I think it must have got in via some unpatched vulnerability or something. I tried running the antivirus software on it, which sort of removed all the crap, but then it popped back up again after a few seconds/minutes.

Have you tried any of the pre-boot AV packages? Krebs on Security had a good article on this a while back...

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/03/removing-viruses-from-a-pc-that-wont-boot/

My apologies if I already posted that to you - I sometimes forget who I've linked what to. XD