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Thread: Malware leeching BW and running up bills ?

  1. #1
    Only african to own a PC! Cider's Avatar
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    Malware leeching BW and running up bills ?

    Hey there,

    Just yesterday I had two clients call in and say there Telephone bill was R13000 (Um around $2000) when it is normally R850 ($100). Their ISP said they had spyware and or malware. The other client said their BW cap ran out in 2 days even though they jsut use Email. And their ISP said it was malware.

    They called here and I jsut wasnt convinved that it was spyware / malware. Is this a reality and can this happen to a home user? I would assume these targeted malware attacks would target companies with unlimited BW , not a home user with a 3G cap and someone on 3G.

    I told them to get the logs from the ISP.

    Any advice on this?
    The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
    Albert Einstein

  2. #2
    0_o Mastermind keezel's Avatar
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    In my experience malware is anything but "targeted". You pick up one trojan horse along the way and it lets all of its buddies in the back door. Before you blink three times your hard drive is loaded up with crap trying to phone home with all sorts of information. I'd say it's conceivable.

    Side story: I once ran McAfee AV via command line outside of Windows and it was removing viruses for three days, the screen constantly scrolling at warp speed the entire time listing the stuff it removed. The machine was running Windows 98 and the user was accessing the internet via AOL dialup... This was a little over a year ago. People just pick up random crap sometimes.

  3. #3
    Only african to own a PC! Cider's Avatar
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    Hey there, Sounds wicked

    What exactly do you mean outside of windows - from the command line?
    The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
    Albert Einstein

  4. #4
    I believe he means from a DOS boot disk, running a scan on the harddrive...

  5. #5
    0_o Mastermind keezel's Avatar
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    I prefer to use Boot CD's that either create a Physical Environment similar to an OS but not installed on the HDD, just running straight from the RAM or just run the scan from the CD prior to booting into Windows. Make any sense? It's more efficient to scan the entire HDD because if you're booted into Windows, there are a lot of files currently being used by something else that you will not be able to scan (or at least modify) with antivirus software.

  6. #6
    Only african to own a PC! Cider's Avatar
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    Hi there,

    Well which AV software will scan out side of windows and if it finds anything will disinfect or delete.

    I know the software I got can scan but cannot disinfect. Real bummer.
    The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
    Albert Einstein

  7. #7
    Dissident 4dm1n brokencrow's Avatar
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    Have them check their dial-up and network connections. See if
    there's more than one. Back in the ol' days (early-2000's) when
    dial-up was prevalent here in the States, some malware would
    create new dial-ups, hooking into 900 (pay) numbers. I've seen
    phone bills jump like you're describing on 'phony' connections.

    Just a thought.
    “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” — Will Rogers

  8. #8
    0_o Mastermind keezel's Avatar
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    There are only three AV scanners I know of that can disinfect from the command line. F-Prot, McAfee, and Trend Micro. I'm sure there are others.

    As for scanners that can disinfect from a PE (physical environment), there are many. All the conventional antispyware/antivirus programs I know of work in a PE.

  9. #9
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    Yes they will work from command line but it depends on how your hard drive is formatted to make the scans work from a bootable CD. NTFS is tricky since you have to load a read/write driver and then do a scan.

  10. #10
    Only african to own a PC! Cider's Avatar
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    Yeah , well most PC's are ntfs these days arent they?
    The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
    Albert Einstein

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