sometimes
Im actually quite impressed with the amount of effort these guys put in to hook someone!
Hackers are using fake parking violation warnings to trick motorists into visiting malware-infested websites. The innovative social engineering trick was pulled off in Grand Forks, North Dakota using windshield fliers with a website address linked to a booby-trapped website. The fliers said: PARKING VIOLATION This vehicle is …
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...to see that the vast majority of malware these days relies pretty heavily on social engineering tactics.
This goes to show that the modern OSes are actually pretty secure. All those security patches have pretty much paid off. We've come a long way in terms of security since the days of the windows 98 password "protection".
I guess it's hard for a lot of us to remember that security wasn't even considered an issue in the early days of computing. Way back then, we were all completely focused on getting the damn things to share stuff, not prevent them from doing so.
In a modern corporate network, there are so many teirs of security that an infection has become a rarity, and for me, a much anticipated treat. A rare chance to pit wits against some black hats ingenuity.
Alas, they rarely put up much of a fight. More often than not, the AV software will have quarantined it before I get to the workstation. Even if they sneak through that, they can usually be hunted down and deleted manually.
There was one a few months back that gave me a breif run for my money. Somehow preventing me from deleting it using a corrupted NTFS permission. All i needed to do was place a full denial permission on the file for the local system account, and that stopped it dead in its tracks from being run.
The weakest component these days is the LNAK (A tech support term I picked up back in the days - stands for Loose Nut At Keyboard).
I think the blaster/sasser worm was the last virus I can remember that could spread without any user intervention. Even then, if you had a firewall - even the built in XP one enabled, it couldn't get in.
A firewall, and AV scanner with decent heuristic algorythms will be pretty much Domestos.
For those non-UK residents, Domestos is a bleech advertised with the slogan "kills all known germs. dead."
Paris, cause she's bound to be harbouring something!