Saturday 15 November 2008

Cyber-crime is bigger than the global drug trade

Take it from someone who works in the IT industry and removes malicious software (malware) from computers on a daily basis; cyber-crime seems to be hitting more people than you might think.

You may think that because you have one of the leading Internet Security (IS) suites installed on your system you can't be affected by malware, but it seems that it does not matter. The SMH article shows that there is a lot of people making big bucks from this scam. Either no-one bothers with IS these days or the leading brands aren't detecting and removing this particular type of malware. My experience leads me to believe it is the latter. Read on for a nifty program that seems to remove this particular type of threat and many others.

I recently attended a global IT conference where we heard from a representative of a respected IS firm who claimed that not only is cyber-crime on the increase but that sources from an Australian and US intelligence organisation have confirmed it is already bigger than the drug trade, globally.

The same representative mentioned they were noticing approximately 600 unique threats per hour and using previous years data this is set to increase to around 27-28000 unique threats per hour in 2015, only seven years away. In saying this, the representative did say they were currently ready for this volume.

Now we know that most IS suites do not seem to detect or remove this particular threat, but do I have a program for you! Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and no I don't work for them, it seems to be the only program that I've found which can detect and remove the threat commonly known as Antivirus XP 2008 or 2009. If it doesn't, then you can either hack your computer for hours to remove it or, while annoying but possibly faster, backup your data and start again.

When you install it make sure to run the update (the program may need to be restarted) then run the update one more time before performing a scan. The quick scan seems to be enough. Once the scan is complete you will be prompted to remove the threats then I would suggest a reboot. That's all, though it can't hurt to run a couple of other IS programs after to make sure.