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| Dialer
as a reason of material losses | |
One of the types of malware (‘any
programs, documents or messages that can have detrimental effects on computers’)
that is becoming more and more problematic nowadays is dialers.
Dialers
are small programs that dial up phone numbers for accessing certain services.
Originally, these types of applications were distributed by Internet service providers
to help clients connect to their servers.
A little later, other services that were accessible from
computers were also developed. These services, which were mainly related to pornography,
were only available through special high-rate telephone numbers and as a result,
dialers were developed to allow users to access them.
However, it wasn’t
long before malicious users realized that, if used in a certain way, dialers for
accessing these services could be extremely profitable. This is when dialers started
being inserted in web pages across the Internet. These pages were designed to
download, install and run dialers that automatically connected the affected computer
to high-rate phone numbers without the user realizing. Around about the same time,
viruses appeared that were designed to do the same, but with the advantage that
they could spread more rapidly.
This process results in a new dial-up network
connection being created, and furthermore, this number will be used as the default
number for connecting to the Internet. Another, even more dangerous, consequence
of this process is that it can disconnect the dial-up network connection the user
normally uses, so that when the user tries to establish a connection, this number
will not connect to the user’s Internet service provider but to a high-rate
toll number.
In either case, the result is the same, the user receives
an exorbitant phone bill. Phone bills run up by dialers have been so significant
that, on many occasions, they have been reported by the media. And what’s
more, the majority of this fee goes directly into the pocket of the author of
the program that has installed the dialer on the affected computer.
Source:
http://www.pandasoftware.com
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