Fake Blue Screen of Death faux-freezes your system like the real McCoy
Thanks to Andrew O’Donnell of SophosLabs for his behind-the-scenes work on this article.
There’s a new fake support scam in town, hiding behind a file calling itself Microsoft Security Essentials, and it’s trying to trick victims into contacting bogus help centers.
The malware, known to Sophos as Troj/Diztakun-A (Microsoft calls it Hicurdismos), is strangely reminiscent of what many readers will know as lockscreen ransomware from back in 2012.
Lockscreen ransomware froze your computer with a web page that tried to squeeze you into paying a “fine”, often for alleged copyright infringement or porn-viewing “offences”, after which the lock screen would be removed.
Malware of this sort, such as the once-widespread Reveton, did its best to stop you switching away from the lockscreen, so that you couldn’t hack your way out of trouble using system tools such as Task Manager.
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