A tale of good versus evil
November 28 2009 Leave a comment
So I was surfing around last night, like I usually do, when an odd window appeared. It was one of those popups designed to look like a real application window, and in this case, it had a bunch of made-up visuals on it designed to make me think that it was an antivirus scanner, and that it had found a bunch of junk on my computer. It called itself “Antivirus System PRO”, and I immediately recognized it as bullshit, and closed the window. Then I noticed something else odd: it had stuck an icon in the taskbar tray, down by the clock. No fake app popup I’ve ever seen can do that. And that’s when it started to take over.
Clicking or right-clicking on the taskbar tray icon merely re-displayed the window I’d closed earlier. Fine, I’ll start Task Manager and kill it that way. Except a Ctrl-Shift-Esc didn’t open Task Manager, it opened an error window saying that taskmgr.exe was infected, and it had been blocked from starting. Fine, time to consult Google on how to get rid of it. I had Chrome open, and Ctrl-T’d to open a new tab. Except I got the same error window again, this time saying that chrome.exe was infected. Ok, I’ll just re-use an already-open tab to get to Google. I’m instead re-directed to a page explaining that that link has been blocked, and I’m offered a link to purchase the “full” version of Antivirus System PRO in order to remove the problem.
I do a Windows+R to get the Run box, with the intent to start cmd.exe to see if maybe there’s a command-line way of killing this thing. cmd.exe gets blocked by the same error window as before. Attempting to start other browsers also doesn’t work. Ok, I know that Internet Explorer is integrated into Windows Explorer, so if I open a Windows Explorer window, I can just type a web URL into the address bar, and bam, I’m surfing. It lets me open a Windows Explorer window, but entering any link in the address bar takes me back to the page I mentioned before. The page that I’m redirected to, bizarrely, says it’s on microsoft.com — all part of the ruse, no doubt.
Fine, you piece of shit. You may be on this computer, but you’re not on the computer a room away. I start that one up, search a bit, and find out that Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware can get rid of this thing. It so happens I have that installed on the infected computer, but of course, I can’t start it because it just gets blocked like any other program I try to run. So I restart into safe mode, update Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, and run it. It finds and nukes the bastard into oblivion.
It’s at this part that I start to think, and I start to get infuriated.
First, how did the thing get on my computer to begin with?
I used to believe that when people said that they got a virus, and that they didn’t download, install, or run anything suspicious to get it, they were delusional or mistaken or just plain lying. But that’s exactly my situation here: I was literally just surfing around, not running anything out of the ordinary, not visiting any sites out of the ordinary, when the bloody thing just showed up and took over.
But what infuriates me more than being a “power user” and still getting outfoxed by malware is that someone made this malware.
See, in our day and age, software is so widely and easily available that we take it for granted that people make it. We just go to a web page, click a link, install, and run. But it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Somebody made that software, and put it up on that web page for you to download.
So, as far as malware goes, it isn’t some rogue program that appeared out of thin air one day and started spreading. Somebody made it. Which means that somebody sat down and decided to make it; they thought about this thing, and planned out, and then created, all of the awful things that it does. Using computers as a means, someone made the conscious decision to hurt other people. That bothers me.
What bothers me more, though, is how readily I was steered to a page where I could buy myself out of this bullshit. In other words, not only did someone make the decision to create software that would maliciously take over other people’s computers, they thought up a way that they could make money off of it.
And not everybody is as resourceful as me. Not everybody has access to another computer that they could use to bail themselves out. Plenty of people out there would be totally helpless against this thing, and would be absolutely forced into paying to get rid of it. Which means that at some point, someone realized the potential of this helplessness… and so they decided to make some software that would allow them to profit from that helplessness. That bothers me.
But what bothers me most, though? It most likely wasn’t built by just one person. And the people that built it were likely paid by someone else to build it. That means that multiple people were involved in creating something designed to exploit the weaknesses of others, and nobody said no. Nobody stood up and said “hey, this doesn’t seem right, maybe we shouldn’t be making this”. Or maybe they did, and they got fired, and replaced by someone that would comply. Regardless, the software was completed, released, and now the participants can sit back and pretend that the rich ends justify the unscrupulous means.
But ultimately, they don’t get to win. For all of the bad that these selfish assholes can come up with, there’s people that make software like Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware. People that decided to use their powers for good; people that sit around all day and use their brains to squash the assholes. And then, on top of the altruism that comes along with creating such software, they give their software away for free. It’s the sort of thing that can restore one’s faith in the race.
