Online Crooks Masquerade as UK Cops within Ongoing Malware Attack

Cyber-criminals have launched a malware campaign targeting innocent Internet-users in U.K after posing as the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) of the country for extorting money from victims, published Zdnet.co.uk in news on September 12, 2011.

On September 9, 2011, the PCeU (Metropolitan Police Service's Central eCrime Unit) warned that visitors to some contaminated websites had taken down malicious files that stopped their PCs from functioning.

The dysfunctional PCs exhibited a pop-up note supposedly from MPS asserting that extreme terrorism or porn-related Internet sites were found inside the users' browsers.

The note directed the computer operators for paying a particularly large amount of fee to MPS via any Internet payment agency.

Remarking about the above mentioned assault, PCeU stated that the MPS wouldn't ever issue such messages. The described action was a scam. Thus, anyone who found the above note on his computer was urged not to give away money in any fee payment alternatively, provide payment info, the Unit added. Zdnet.co.uk published this.

The PCeU further urged that if anybody doubted as having been victimized with the scam that person should inform his area cops.

Unfortunately, the attack resembles that by the Ransom.an Trojan, which was recently detected. This Trojan, using German text and asserting to be a Microsoft message, demanded $126 from victims in 48-hrs to get themselves a Windows license otherwise their computers would be locked.

Security researchers have remarked that the above kind of ransom assaults using the technique of social engineering is intermittently rampant ever-since 2006 when they were first attempted. The most consistent perpetrator has been Gpcode. Normally the locking system isn't there alternatively experts can effortlessly undo it, while sometimes encryption has been utilized in the assault though that approach is no longer favorable due to its resultant complexity, the researchers continue.

Additionally, the researchers state that considering scareware assaults where cyber-criminals look for acquiring payment for computer contaminations that do not exist, the ransom attacks currently represent the farthest variations of the same. And they conclude that perhaps, it's this kind of assault's success that has made it possible for ransom malware to prevail.

Related article: Online Card Fraud Shows Greater Tendency Than Chip and Pin

» SPAMfighter News - 9/21/2011