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Google Caches Virus Popup

By Phil Whelan | 2 minute read

This evening I was looking at some of the spam found in my Gmail Spam folder. I started using Google Search to see if I could correlate some websites related to the spam. I did find some interesting things, such as the bad English “recorded for security purpose”, found on one spam-related website, is copied across several spam-related sites. I was looking for some casual correlation to hopefully find some bad IP addresses not found in one of the top RBL sites, such as Spamhaus. Alas, Spamhaus had me beat. It knew them all.

But then I found something rather interesting. I came across a website with a pop-up, trying to get me to download a Windows executable file.

In order for this to work I’d have to click on the fake dialogue button “Continue”. Then a real dialogue with an option for “Save As” appears, I download it, open it, and enjoy using my new virus. Okay, so nothing new and exciting there. It’s a pretty simple website trying to con me into running their malicious code.

Now I was curious how many duplicate pages out there had the same pop-up, so I did a search for the text “You need to download new version of Video ActiveX Object to play this video file.”.

I clicked on the first result.

But the page was gone.

I was really looking forward to that virus pop-up. Never mind, maybe Google Cache can help me out.

Excellent! The spammer took down the webpage linking to their exploit code, but luckily Google Cache was able to save a copy of the page, which popped-up the “Save As” dialogue, so I can now download it and enjoying start using my new virus, as it silently rips through my machine, stealing my personal data and emailing spam around world.

I uploaded this file to the Kaspersky Virus Scanner and it was identified as being “infected by Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Zlob.eob”.

Oh no, I just realized. This exploit is not platform independent and will not run on my machine. It only runs on Windows and I’m using Ubuntu Linux. I guess I’ll have to keep googling…

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