A Technibble subscriber and a fellow computer technician, Patrick Croteau of www.logic1.com sent us an interesting tip today. One of his clients was infected with a typical rogue-antivirus which he went out and cleaned up. However, they managed to reinfect themselves later that day and upon checking their internet history he found this:
When you search for “dancing with the stars 2010 lineup” on Google, which is a fairly innocent query and probably searched for a lot; the top result is a hacked site with malware hosted on it.
When you visit it, you’ll see your typical “You have 100 viruses” scareware.
Once installed, the malware product appears to be the rogue antivirus “CleanUp Antivirus”.
As Patrick said “I’ll bet its making them a fortune”. Such an innocent query with a malicious site as the top result. If you ever do encounter this infection, BleepingComputer.com have removal instructions for Cleanup Antivirus.

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Wrong, but I must admit this is funny. If only the same people who make this crap could put their time towards useful efforts.
If you ever find a bad website. You should report it to http://badwarebusters.org/community/submit
Jenn
Yeah this is funny. I mean who is searching for dancing with the stars anyway? I believe it though if it is a highly rated search term then it is an easy way to infect a lot of computers.
Derrick
Interesting thing about this little bugger is how it gets on the computer, i had a formatted machine in the front of my shop, clean format, just plugged it into the internet to activate windows and do updates from the Microsoft website. Before i was even done choosing my option (custom) this program was up and running on a freshly formatted machine still missing some drivers and no programs but the basic windows install. I wonder if it doesn’t propagate itself through a backdoor/known vulerability i have had customers coming in all day with the same program, its a quick 5-10min fix but still a bugger to be doing all day.
Rouges are so common now. It’s too bad most anti virus still aren’t great at catching them. At least they’re usually easy enough to remove.
I think the only way to be safe is to remove Dancing with the Stars from the TV schedule. Then everyone is saved. :)
It is amazing how people will just click on anything when they are out and about out there.
this is one more reason why we recommend WOT (web of trust) to our customers. Not that WOT stops everything, but it is one more good layer of protection to ad with crap like this.
It’s too bad most anti virus still aren’t great at catching them