Hey there Webrooters,
Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’re doing well this week!
Who here has had a bad experience with malware? Password stolen? Online gaming account hacked? Experienced identity theft as a result of personal info being stolen? Had money drained from a bank account due to clicking a phishing link?
Because we’ve all committed to using an antivirus solution such as Webroot, I assume we’ve at least had a close call with malware, if not a full-blown horror story. I have a couple of my own stories that I’ll share below, and I’m really interested to hear some of yours!
Story #1:
My first experience dealing with malware was when I was around 11 or 12 years old. This would have been in 2004/2005. At the time I was heavily involved in an online MMORPG video game called “RuneScape” - I assume some of you have heard of or played this game. To this day, it’s one of the most popular online games in the world. By this point, I had committed a serious amount of time and energy into my character within the game. I was a very high level and had a lot of in-game gold amassed from my efforts. This was also around the time that I (stupidly) was using a program called “Kazaa” to download music. At some point, I downloaded an album that was infected with a keylogger. This is a piece of malware that records all your keystrokes and sends that data to the perpetrator.
So, my account password got stolen. When I recovered my password using the “e-mail a new password” method, I logged in to find all my in-game wealth had been stolen and transferred to another account. This in-game currency was likely sold on a marketplace for real-life currency. Obviously, as a 12-year-old, I was devastated. I had no idea how my password was stolen so I started working to earn more currency from scratch within the game. Then it got stolen again, and I learned the hard way that I was dealing with a virus. This was the first time that I ever learned about (very ancient) antivirus software and after fiddling with a few free programs, one of them found the keylogger and removed it from my computer. It was a hard lesson (for a young kid) that taught me how harsh the online world is if you’re not careful.
Story #2:
This one was far more recent and had more consequential real-life effects. I was attempting to download a legal piece of freeware called Ccleaner (which I’ve used on many computers). This time, however, I accidentally clicked a spoofed google ad link instead of the official ccleaner.com link. I’m not sure how they did it, but I swear that the link still looked like “ccleaner.com”. It looked and acted like the official website and I downloaded what I thought was the official version of Ccleaner. As soon as I clicked on the .exe link, this nasty piece of malware completely disabled by antivirius solution (at the time, I wasn’t using Webroot). It then got full root access to my computer. I saw CMD commands running incredibly fast, adware started appearing, and my computer slowed to a crawl. At this point, I knew I was in serious trouble. While I was busy trying to re-activate my antivirus and run a scan, I got an e-mail on my phone from Coinbase.com that said “Congratulations! You just purchased $3,500 of Bitcoin!”
Oh no.
Whoever was running this virus went through my currently logged in accounts on Chrome and found that I was still logged into Coinbase, a market for buying the digital currency, Bitcoin.
Yup. They drained my bank account of $3500 dollars just like that. And then they sent it off Coinbase to a personal BTC wallet immediately. By the time I called Coinbase to try and freeze the transaction, it was too late. The BTC was gone. Because it was done using a bank transfer and not a credit card, I couldn’t easily reverse the transaction. I went through a 4-month process of getting a police report, making a report with my bank, and eventually getting the money refunded into my checking account. It was an absolute nightmare – All due to clicking a bad link and running a .exe program while I had insufficient antivirus protections on my computer.
So those are my two malware horror stories. Did you get the chills yet? I’d love to hear some of yours - please share your scariest malware stories down below!
