Is It Just Me...

Is it just me or are people getting more viruses this month? I've worked on 5 machines in the past week (on the side) and all are getting a BSOD. Each time, I remove a certain virus and the issue is gone. Its a trojan downloader and I was wondering if anyone else was having the same experience? Obviously, more people are doing things online with Christmas coming, but I don't remember being this busy in a long time.

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Comments

RobertKaucher

My experience is that this kind of stuff alwaqys picks up around this time of year. I am seeing it too.

vCole

RobertKaucher wrote: »

My experience is that this kind of stuff alwaqys picks up around this time of year. I am seeing it too.

Same here unfortunately.

Paul Boz

That is because spam and phishing greatly increases at christmas time. Attackers understand that people are in the spending mood so "too good to be true" solicitations become very popular. 4th quarter of the year is always very busy with spammers. more spam = more malware.

NetAdmin2436

I notice attacks around other holidays as well. Hackers know that people normally take time off for the holidays and so they try and target networks/servers while people are OOTO.

NetworkingStudent

the_Grinch wrote: »

Is it just me or are people getting more viruses this month? I've worked on 5 machines in the past week (on the side) and all are getting a BSOD. Each time, I remove a certain virus and the issue is gone. Its a trojan downloader and I was wondering if anyone else was having the same experience? Obviously, more people are doing things online with Christmas coming, but I don't remember being this busy in a long time.

I remember when Myspace was loaded with viruses and fake accounts, but now it looks like Twitter and Facebook are the new victims of Social engineering.

Hackers spreading social misery with their viruses | StarTribune.com

Hackers spreading social misery with their viruses
As attacks increasingly target Twitter and Facebook, users are facing the widespread humiliation that comes with having their accounts hijacked.

arwes

Yeah one of our telecommuters decided she'd visit Facebook on her work laptop while we had an outage. She clicked on a link she thought was safe (it came from a relative) and before you know it, she's driving 50 miles to my office so I can get her spyware removed.

My mom gets spyware all the time (well, not as much now since I put NOD32 on her machine) because she Googles things like free sewing patterns & stuff like that. Probably a lot of people searching for craft stuff like that this time of the year, and some of these ads are just ridiculous with the spyware. One thing I've done with all the machines at work and at home is turn off Javascript in Adobe Reader. There's no need for it at all, but it's amazing the number of ads that try to execute Javascript code to install spyware through Adobe Reader.

veritas_libertas

You guys are giving me shivers, the last thing I want to do is spend hours removing viruses.

the_Grinch

Good for business...just a pain to deal with. Some really nasty things out there right now, I am working on a laptop where the infection actually stopped the wireless card from working. Crazy stuff!

Forsaken_GA

as long as the botnet masters take this year off.... i was working an overnight shift last christmas, right around 6am on christmas last year, we started getting hit with a multi-gigabit DDoS (nailed us, ISPRIME, and a few other networks, so I'm sure a few folks here remember it). Let's just say waking my bosses and my bosses bosses up that early on christmas morning for work related crap was not a pleasant thing to do.