Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Attacked by SpyDawn Virus!

Yesterday, one of my PCs was attacked by the SpyDawn virus. What a total pain! It sets itself up as a free virus checker and then gives you false virus reports. The only remedy for the viruses it pretends to find is to send them money to buy the full version of SpyDawn. It also hijacks your browsers so that they all open up to the SpyDawn website and it throws a ton of pop up windows out there, too.

Luckily I was able to Google SpyDawn and find a removal tool and instructions. Apparently it doesn't do any permanent damage other than the annoyance and the attempt to extort money from you.

I wasn't able to find a reference to it on the Symantec site nor on the Microsoft site. It must be a pretty new bug.

5 comments:

Justin said...

It's technically not a virus... it falls more in the spyware/adware/junkware category.

Kelly the little black dog said...

Virus - oh ya I've head of those. Its one of those PC things. ;-)

Justin said...

Mac users 'still lax on security'

Apple Mac users are still too lax when it comes to security matters, an independent researcher has said.


'nuff said

Kelly the little black dog said...

Quite true - but Macs as well as linux are too small a target for anyone to bother. To quote from the article you linked -
But Mac experts have pointed out that none of the exploits have ever successfully been used to hijack an Apple computer.

By contrast hundreds of thousands of Windows machines have been taken over as part of so-called bot nets, which use the hijacked machines to deliver millions of spam e-mails around the world.


So as far as the average user is concerned, Macs are effectively safer. It really doesn't matter why. As long as we make a relatively small part of the market share we're going to remain that way. ;-)

K T Cat said...

So the key to the whole Mac security success is its failure as a product in general.

Brilliant!

:-)