30 minute malware install? Yes please!

The last six months have seen a rather dramatic increase in Malware and Adware install sizes. The guys who make this stuff must have panicked when they realised their diallers would be obsolete in the face of DSL, so they came up with a whole new way to screw up your machine - they just throw endless megabytes of crud at it instead until you give up and start to cry.

Yes, hot on the heels of - well - whatever the last superhuge install was, comes this priceless gem, discovered by Webhelper (Kung Fu kickin' spyware hunter). In a bizarre twist, his site is called Webhelper4u.com, and the install site is called Wallpapers4u.com. I'm sure there's some sick Adware guy humour in there somewhere, but I digress - back to the install.

Never before has it been so important to make sure you're running the latest patches - because if you're not, you may be on the recieving end of a thirty-minute adware install...of doom! (Assuming you like going looking for desktop Wallpapers in your spare time, that is, and not Webhelpers).

Using the Windows Media Player exploit (and a few others), it doesn't matter if you click no to the prompts, or if you try and shut things down, or if you pray really hard to the God of the Interweb. You commited the terrible sin of wanting free stuff for you PC, and now you must be punished!

It's never good when you get a popup saying "Congratulations!" is it? And that trend continues here:



While the install continues regardless, go away, have a few beers, catch the rerun of Ben Hur, then return to a PC that, quite frankly, might as well be reformatted because of the amount of junk loaded up onto it. I won't reproduce the list as it's already on Webhelper's site (along with more information regarding how this thing gets on board in the first place), but this kind of mass install (and they're only going to get bigger) is going to cause major headaches for security forums dedicated to removing this kind of thing. At this rate, it won't be too long before the answer to everything is not to run Hijack This, or Ad-Aware, or anything else - it'll simply be to scrub everything and start again.

The lesson learned here? Never attempt to get anything free off the Internet. Ever again. In fact, don't buy anything either, just to be on the safe side. In fact - aw, forget it, put down that midget and pass me the Hornyporn!