Ransomware that demands money so you can access your files is a popular tactic, and here we have another example of this extremely shady practice.
The end-user is presented with a fake warning message from theflowerzf(dot)info, using browser specific messaging that’s recently become popular.
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“Install the update for Internet Explorer”, they say. What they don’t tell you is that this IE upgrade will lock you out of your PC with the following horror-story message:
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Yes, things are generally looking pretty bad when yellow police tape has been stuck to your monitor. The victim is told they have commited network crime, and that 19 files have been found related to “unlicensed software, movies and music” and “materials with pornographic content (including homosexual content pornography)”, and that this will be serving as material evidence in a court.
They’re given twenty four hours to do something about it, lest their information be sent to a police department and all content on the PC be blocked until arrest.
Charming.
This is how they want the victim to get out of the situation:
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The unfortunate individual has to phone one of the numbers listed to obtain an activation key, then punch it into the spaces at the bottom of the screen. As you might imagine, this is going to cost some money (and I’m not sure I’d trust the price listed…or even if they’ll give control of the PC back once the cash has changed hands).
We detect this as Win32.Malware!Drop. Thanks to Patrick for finding this one.
Christopher Boyd