Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

2009 is going to be an annoying year for Windows users. My girlfriend already found that out in the last weeks for Xmas. The latest malware that hackers use to penetrate your computer goes in the form of fake webpages that act and behave like a virus scanner (see image on the top left). They pop-up pretenting to be either an XP or Vista alert and when you do not watch out what you're doing, download a file like SpywareGuard2008.exe which is not an anti-spyware program, but actually malware/spyware disguised as anti-spyware.

In my case I was just surfing the web with Safari on my MacBook Pro when I encountered a website that tried to convince my Mac it was actually an infected PC. When I clicked on the screen it just download SpywareGuard2008.exe. Off course that does not fly on a Mac.

Since I'm an IT expert (ahum) I'm not impressed by these attempts: since 1995 I've never had a virus. But for the not so knowledgeable people this really might look like a genuine problem and they will be presuaded to install the program.

In case you did so: get rid of it by installing either one of these legitimate anti-malware/spyware programs:

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free
HitmanPro 3

Video of the malware in action: