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Tag Archives: malware

Malware masquerading as repair tools

18 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by fullerbecker in Uncategorized

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Tags

malware, scam, seo

Wow, my hat is off to this crew. (Warning: malware ahead, so I’m not linking to any of the sites or searches referenced.)

I’ve been getting this error when trying to accept autoupdate prompts from the WebEx Outlook plugin:

After a week of that, I finally got sufficiently annoyed to Google the error, as one does.

Lots of off-target results when searching the first sentence of the error, so I added quotes around the string; that search gave me ONE hit:

Wow! Perfect! Oh, sweet, there’s a tool to fix the problem!

Hey wait a minute – this is not webex.com. And the language on the page is a bit techno-babbly.

Whose website is this? There’s no links to the home page, so just hack the URL off in the address bar and go to http://www.%5Bredacted_bad_guy_domain%5D.com and…

WOW.

Bonus points: that language drop-down menu was just added for verisimilitude – it doesn’t actually have any options other than English!

In case it wasn’t obvious: don’t download anything from this website.

Virustotal.com confirms the obvious: it’s packed with malware.

This is a great opportunity to point out that there are people at great software companies who DO make sure that when customers search for error messages, they can find good content which helps them solve problems – instead of falling prey to malware scammers like this. SEO FTW!

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