Malware / Trojan / Virus Part Three
By Heather - Page 2
Premium rate Phone Diallers
I realise that I've completely neglected discussing autodiallers. Not being on dial-up, it is easy to forget that many people still are. Almost by definition, these are likely to be the people who can least afford novelty oversize phone bills.
A dialler is malware that tries to dial home to a premium rate line. It can be the most devastating for a home user. Trying to get your phone company to accept that you didn't spend the month ringing premium rate lines is quite difficult, when you consider that they get half the money for these lines.......... It's bad enough that phone companies make their money out of people who are stupid enough to deliberately dial premium rate lines. Making money from people who don't know that their computer is sneakily running up calls on their behalf is absolutely scandalous. One point here is that the companies that operate these things must be really easy to find, because they have to have a contract with a phone company and an account where they can receive their share of the loot from the phone company. So there is no excuse for this type of scam from continuing. I would expect that the phone companies that allow these activities to carry on must be liable to prosecution for conspiracy to defraud.
If you aren't on dial-up, a spyware dial home device is just a pure nuisance in terms of using your processes to try to run itself. Don't get too smug though. I am sure that there will be some unexpected way of extracting money through links to broadband connections. My luck being such as it is, I will probably have one within the week.....
Examples from Doxdesk include an ActiveX dialler DialerActiveX.html that sits on websites and runs a dialler from there.
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