YouTube “malware” sites threaten web users

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 10 October 2008 13:02

Opinion and Analysis

Sadly another trick known as “clickjacking” is appearing on the Internet as well, hijacking the links on legitimate sites and taking you somewhere else, even if it’s to a page that looks exactly like what you were expecting, which could make the advice to type in a site’s address yourself not as useful as it should be.

Becoming “street web wise” to these kinds of social engineering tricks is one way to protect yourself – if you’re suspicious, then close the browser window and don’t proceed.

But if you’re not able to tell the fake sites from the real ones, then other things you can do include:

- Making sure you have the latest paid 2009 “Internet Security” suite from whichever vendor and making sure it is updating itself automatically.

- Cobbling together your own Internet security suite from free programs (such as AVG Free or Avast Free for anti-virus, ZoneAlarm Free as a better firewall than the one loaded into Windows XP or Vista, Spybot Search and Destroy or Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware to remove malware.

- Buying a browser security package (only for IE and Firefox) like ZoneAlarm ForceField which "virtualises" your browsing sessions so anything you are infected by doesn't actually get loaded onto your computer.

- Buying a browser independent transaction security solution like TrustDefender which shuts down viruses, trojans, rootkits and other malware (whether known, and importantly, even if unknown) whenever logging in to your bank or other websites augmenting your anti-virus/anti-malware security to a completely new level.

Or doing all of the above, while being careful what you click on, knowing that more than ever, we digitally live in the wild, wild web, and the online crims are out to get us all!