Parking Ticket Scam Leads to Malware

By  |  Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 8:08 am

Give these hackers some credit: this malware scam takes an offline world incovenience — the parking ticket — and turns it into a way to dupe users into installing malware on their computers.

These fake parking tickets have begun appearing on cars around Grand Forks, North Dakota, which directed users to a website.

The yellow flier reads:

PARKING VIOLATION This vehicle is in violation of standard parking regulations. To view pictures with information about your parking preferences, go to [website redacted]

Once on the website, pictures of cars in the area are shown, with the license plate information removed of course (oh, what nice hackers, eh?). In order to “find” your vehicle, the site asks the user to download a toolbar.

A trojan horse is installed by the toolbar, which directs information to childhe.com. That domain has already been fingered as malicious by several antivirus companies, including Symantec.

From here the user would get several fake infection warnings, which then would prompt for the install of even more malware. You got to give these folks credit: this is probably the most ingenious scam I’ve seen yet when it comes to virus and malware trickery.

 
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  1. dosequis Says:

    Hmm… Evil, yet genius!

  2. antivirus firewall Says:

    Is antivirus firewall still needed? there was no major virus attack lately!