Kaspersky Warns Against Dial-Up Trojans

This one goes out to all the remaining dial-up users all over the world. Be warned! Some cyber criminals will single you just because of it and you don't want to have to fix the damage they'll do. Right now you have a bull's-eye on your balls, because they'll hit you where it hurts most.

The latest attack aimed at old school dial-up users and that topped last year's charts is with a Trojan dialer. It will attempt to stealthily disconnect the infected PC from the ISP in use and then reconnect it to another and much more expensive phone number, said Web User. Now, do you understand why I said it will hurt?

Kaspersky Labs, the same company that made the statistics mentioned above, said that as long as there'll be dial-up, its users will be targets. "Dial-up is still relied upon for internet access and cybercriminals are continuing to target those who are vulnerable to attack," David Emm said.

Take the United Kingdom, for example, where 11.6 percent of the total Internet users are subscribed to a dial-up service, and calculate the impact a massive attack of these Trojans would have in a single country. And then, consider the 9.6 million subscribers that AOL still has and think about the effect of somebody bringing the little bugger to one of the servers, from where it can send itself to all the users. I'm not ahead of my time, if it can disconnect and then reconnect somewhere else, a little code and it'll email itself to anyone.

"Internet users, whether dial-up or broadband, should ensure they have an internet security regime including regular scheduled malware updates, heuristic analysis and real-time behaviour blocking, to ensure detection and protection against known and unknown threats," Kaspersky Labs' Emm warned.

Oh, and let's not forget what Trojans are really good at, namely opening your computer to other malware auto-installing itself. If your protection is not up-to-date, you're one dial away from being a part of the Storm botnet without knowing it.