VirusRescue - will someone rescue me from it?

Know what makes me laugh?

When people behind applications of a decidedly dubious nature start posting on sites that examine their screwball qualities. Sometimes you get a one off exchange - other times, you get something like Yapbrowser and it all kicks off.

What I particularly hate, are those applications that claim to remove all kinds of garbage, yet appear on your PC via a hijack in the first place. I mean, they just suck. SpywareQuake, SpyHeal, VirusBlast, SpyAxe, Jimmy McSpankpants Ultra Mega Virus Chomper...well, you get the idea.

And it came to pass, that one such exchange recently took place here, over at Security Cadets. See, you don't want to draw attention to yourself when you're already up to your eyeballs in dubiousness, because you're just gonna' get the 21 Gun Salute of Doom. Now, a lot of the time, these applications are rather bland and unexceptional - they don't do anything particularly malicious themselves - it's the way they get onto your system that tends to annoy people. I don't think I've ever seen someone turn up on a forum and say oh wow, yeah, I just downloaded SpyAxe all by myself, it rocks!

No, you're more likely to see people praying and crying and stuff. Then again, if I got a hijack on my PC via CWS exploits and other such garbage, I'd be crying too.

At present, this particular nugget of joy mostly comes from something called Zlob, which is a "pretend" video codec you supposedly need to install to view adult videos. When you do this, all you usually get for your troubles is a bunch of crappy popups asking you to pay $49 to clean up your system. Nice!

Technical details here. A writeup by Nick of Security Ticker here. Proof that the boobs behind VirusRescue are indeed linked to other craptacular sites of a similar nature here.

You'd think these guys would give up spamming blogs with their totally unbelievable claims, already...