Legal Research

Yet Another Reason Why I’m Glad I Don’t Live In North Dakota

Here’s an interesting article about a novel way to trick people into downloading malware onto their PCs.

Someone in North Dakota has been putting motor vehicle violation notices on people’s cars parked in various locations. The notices instruct the car owners to visit a particular Website in order to see pictures of their cars caught in the act of violating the law. Once there, the individuals are informed that they need to download a picture search toolbar. If they follow the instructions, bingo! — they download the malware. It hijacks their browsers.

But it gets worse. The malware eventually triggers a fake warning about virus infection and instructs the users to download a bogus antivirus program that’s also malware. (Details here, if you’re interested.)

Lessons?

(1) The weather isn’t the only scary thing about North Dakota.

(2) I probably ought to re-post this article once a month. (I’m told “mishnah” means “learning by repetition”.)

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on February 05, 2009 (boomark / email).