Some brilliant jerk found an entirely new way to spread malware: he distributed fake parking tickets that prompted victims to visit a malicious website. [ZDNet]
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Brilliant jerk – I like the sound of that. I just need to change one thing…
That’s…. genius. And evil. But genius.
And evil.
that is just evil…pure and simple, evil.
Virus writers should stop taking advantage of the idiocy of novice computer users with this kind of psychology that any smart person can see through, and instead go back to finding zero-day exploits like the good old days.
i always thought it would be funny to do something like that except with lemonparty.org as the URL. malicious, sure, but not evil.
If the URL of the Web site to which the recipients were directed wasn’t a .gov, that should’ve been suspicious. And if the miscreant managed to hijack a .gov site, wow.
@Hyman Decent: Not all cities and towns have .gov domains. My town has a .org and .com domain, but the .com is run by high school alumni.
@Hyman Decent: I work in parking enforcement for a university, our ticket payment website is a third party contractor and ends in .com.
Our website for more info is a .edu.
This guy should have his knees smashed in.
Wow, that presumably took some effort. First, he would have to design an authentic looking ticket, then print up buku copies, and then do all of the legwork to put them on a bunch of people’s cars. And, he did it in Grand Forks, ND, which is one of the coldest places on the planet this time of year. The guy’s no slouch. A criminal, yes, but a hard-working one.
@razremytuxbuddy: Buku? Really? Try “beaucoup” next time.
The guy probably paid a few poor people in cash to distribute them. And if he’s any good, he found a way to scam the self-serve copiers at some Kinko’s or Staples to get his fake tickets printed up.
@GearheadGeek: LOL! I spelled it the way I pronounce it. I’m not French, and don’t want to misrepresent myself to be French. Thanks for making me laugh at myself for just a moment, though.
At least in this case it should be comparatively easy to find someone to blame. If there were any security cameras nearby they could catch this guys face, or they could try to pull fingerprints off the cars. Most likely he is only some peon the Russian mob or whoever hired to do this, but they could trace his contacts to attempt to find who is distributing this. Online these sites spreading this stuff are always obscured with 6 fake companies and fake registrar info. Half the time they’re hosted on the bot-netted machines themselves. Having an actual human lead is much more promising.
This irritates me. We already have enough people acting like they should just throw out our tickets when we give them, now this kind of thing is going to have people saying “Oh, but I couldn’t go to the website to pay, I thought it would infect my computer” or “Oh, I figured it was a fake”
I think it’s funny how there’s a combination of anger and awe at what the guy did.
Well geez the suckers are from UND, no wonder they were dumb enough to fall for it.
The only problem I see here is that the idiots were using Internet Explorer – which may as well be considered malware cheesecloth. One of my clients just called me yesterday with something similar, they complained that the virus scanner “I put on their computer” was giving them some error – and it sounded fishy.
Turns out it was a popup from “Windows Security Defender” or somesuch, which is malware propagated through Internet Explorer’s security holes. I told him to do a REAL Anti-Spyware/Virii scan and get rid of it.
@Oranges w/ Cheese: Windows Defender is NOT malware. It is a legit Windows Firewall program (that does no good, but is not malware itself).
There IS though a couple of Malware programs that imitate Windows Defender very effectively and there are only one or two clues to set off somebody very familiar with the program that it isn’t a real warning/pop-up. And once that pop-up happens, the computers already well infected anyway.