How This Savvy Techie Downloaded His First Virus

January 7th, 2008

Technorati Tags: virus,blogging,wordpress,pc pitstop,norton,social engineering,adware,malware

After 25 years of safe computing last Friday evening the social engineering behind viral transmission finally beat me. I downloaded my first ever virus on Friday night.

How on earth could I get suckered? Through my website’s statistics. I thought I was safe inside my web server’s stats program. Just like people used to think ten years ago about their email.

You’re not safe anymore. Don’t click the links within your stats.

I’ve been computing since playing snake in my preteen Commodore PET timesharing days in Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science in the early 1980s.

I owned my first Apple //e in 1983 when I was in middle school. I worked for both America Online and Gateway computers in technical support. I’ve installed Citrix systems and rolled out configurations across five hundred desktops overnight.

And now I was another malware statistic.

Bloggers and small business owners who host on your own servers: beware of the tvsetmp3 dot com address. I’m sure it’s only going to be one of many such evil backlinks we will be dealing with soon.

Stats junkie sees referral link – who’s this?

When I was looking through the referring links I found this one for tvsetmp3. com. Warning: do not hit that site! That’s why I didn’t hyperlink it.

While it looked innocuous, this is a new and innovative method to get website owners to click on links they normally wouldn’t.

I had also been experiencing problems with my Apache server’s AWStats – it wasn’t showing results for over a week on any of the domains I’ve got hosted. So now my AWStats is under my scrutiny.