FAKE ANTIVIRUS / BAD DOWNLOADS

Hello, everyone!

Now, let us discuss about one of the prominent threats on the internet. A FAKE ANTIVIRUS Software and BAD DOWNLOADS.

FAKE ANTIVIRUS:

One can inadvertently download a Fake Antivirus if you don’t have email filtering or web filtering in place. For example, fake AV was the payload of the elaborate UPS email scam which was recently exposed.

Installing such software is soo easy, but uninstalling it would be your worst nightmare. It requires a lot of time and very much care to uninstall such software. Such applications stays calm for a time after the installation before it starts becoming such a burden. It starts creating false alarms, messages etc… but the application would be so convincing that it is a real one. These infections might trick you into buying false subscriptions also.

FIGHTING A FAKE AV……

• There will always be an Anti Virus provided with the PC itself. If you see any alert from the desktop AV but not from the one you installed, then it is a fake.
• You can always use a Web Security service. It helps you prevent the unwanted and malicious downloads from the internet.
• Sometimes your Desktop AV might not be up to date. So it is best to use an Web Security or Web Filtering service for any kind of downloads. You will get the best service from these services.

BAD DOWNLOADS:

You were watching “Money Heist” on Netflix, suddenly your subscription is over. You have no money to pay for the subscription at the moment, but the episode was so interesting that you want to complete watching it now. So, you ended up in a website where you can download it for free. You downloaded it without any problem and then started watching it.

Then starts the problem. You get weird pop-ups, adds, normal applications act weird and at last your system gets crashed. The possible explanation would be that you picked a malicious website that gave you a virus.

If you want to download something, search for it on a legit site or a site that you trust but not on the sites that seem to be solving your problem in an instance.

An example of such BAD DOWNLOADS is Zip Bomb:

It is also known as “Zip Death” or “Decompression bomb”. These files are designed to crash the system in which it will be downloaded. One such example is 42.zip, it is a compressed file consisting of 42 kilobytes of compressed data. It contains five layers, with each layer consisting of nested zip files in set of 16. Each bottom layer archive consists of 4.3 Gigabyte file, for a total of 4.5 Petabytes of uncompressed data. 4.5 Petabytes would be around 4,718,592 Gigabytes, which would be around 4000 times the capacity of any normal PC. When this file is uncompressed it would cause a buffer overflow, an out-of-memory condition, it might even exceed the acceptable amount of time for a program execution, which in turn crashes the PC.

You can find more such posts on my blog: LOGICAL TECHNOLOGY