Beware of bogus anti-virus software

A clever piece of social engineering appears at first to be something similar to the old-fashioned mass-mailing worms which were designed to annoy, but the MonaRonaDona virus actually goes much further than that.

Once infected, a pop-up will appear, stating, “Hi, My name is MonaRonaDona. I am a Virus and I am here to Wreck Your PC. If you observe strange behavior with your PC, like program windows disappearing etc, it’s me who is doing all this. I was created as a protest against the Human Rights Violation being observed throughout the world & the very purpose of my existence is to remind & stress the world to respect humanity.”

There have been over the years, many such emails, spam messages, viruses and worms which were designed as part of some social protest, and the perpetrators in their righteousness believe that they should be excused from their mischief because of their noble cause. Pure poppycock of course; an attack is an attack, regardless of the reason. But, this one only uses the “noble protest” as a ruse to sell useless anti-malware software.

Regardless of how you may feel about the vague “human rights violations” mentioned in the pop-up, most of us will feel put upon to receive this unannounced missive. The first reaction is to conduct a Web search on the word “MonaRonaDona”, at which point one would be referred to one of several forums or YouTube videos that discuss it, and point the reader to a particular anti-malware solution to fix it. The anti-virus software, called Unigray, claims to detect hundreds of thousands of threats, but the company domain was registered only on February 20.

That’s the first red flag. It’s a marketing scheme. The perpetrators have created these Web sites and references ahead of time, so that when victims conduct a search, they will find these links, which promote their own $40 anti-virus software, which removes the MonaRonaDona virus, but does nothing else.