Can a virus dial-up a premium rate phoneline?

[Rez Manzoori]

Sorry if this is a blatantly obvious question but does anyone know if a
virus/trojan/whatever dial-up a premium rate phone number and run up big
phone bills?

A colleague at work has just had his first NTL phone bill and is shocked to
discover there are nearly £30 worth of calls to 09097 premium rate phone
lines. He's contacted NTL customer support to query this only to be told it
is a premium rate line with 'Adult Content'.

Needless to say he is less than hapy about this, and has asked me for
advice.... like I'd know about premium rate phone calls! ;-)

So how about it? Can a malicious bit of code get the computer to dial-up
such a line?

TIA!

 

[David H. Lipman]

Sure. And there also Porn Dialers as well.

If you don't have AV software, go to McAfee and/or Trend (http://housecall.antivirus.com )
and perform an omline scan of your platform and report back your results.

Dave


| Sorry if this is a blatantly obvious question but does anyone know if a
| virus/trojan/whatever dial-up a premium rate phone number and run up big
| phone bills?
|
| A colleague at work has just had his first NTL phone bill and is shocked to
| discover there are nearly £30 worth of calls to 09097 premium rate phone
| lines. He's contacted NTL customer support to query this only to be told it
| is a premium rate line with 'Adult Content'.
|
| Needless to say he is less than hapy about this, and has asked me for
| advice.... like I'd know about premium rate phone calls! ;-)
|
| So how about it? Can a malicious bit of code get the computer to dial-up
| such a line?
|
| TIA!
| --
| Rez Manzoori
| (remove M-Y-K-E-K-S to e-mail)
|
|
|

 

[Rez Manzoori]

Thanks David. I've passed on a reommendation to search his system for Porn
Diallers as that's the most likely cause!

Cheers!

--
Rez Manzoori

Sure. And there also Porn Dialers as well.

If you don't have AV software, go to McAfee and/or Trend

(http://housecall.antivirus.com )

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Quoth the raven named Rez Manzoori:

Sorry if this is a blatantly obvious question but does anyone know if a
virus/trojan/whatever dial-up a premium rate phone number and run up big
phone bills? ...

Go get Spybot S&D. It finds many rogue dialers and removes them.
AdAware is good too for spyware, but I don't think it does dialers.
Spybot also finds common software keyloggers.

For both, download and install, then get latest update sig files
before scanning. Both are free.

Spybot Search & Destroy: http://security.kolla.de/
AdAware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/

 

[James Egan]

Needless to say he is less than hapy about this, and has asked me for
advice.... like I'd know about premium rate phone calls! ;-)

Complain here. http://www.icstis.org.uk

Read all about it here. http://www.premiumrateservices.com/faqs.htm


Jim.

 

[Why so many stars for so few four-leaf clovers?]

In

Sure. And there also Porn Dialers as well.

This is what they are made for...

--

Jean-Luc Cavey
Paris, France
E-Mail : (e-mail address removed)
http://canon.cavey.org/

 

[Robin T Cox]

Sorry if this is a blatantly obvious question but does anyone know if a
virus/trojan/whatever dial-up a premium rate phone number and run up big
phone bills?

Currently Spybot S&D lists, and will deal with, 107 dialler parasites. To
see their names, use the Settings/Products tabs in Spybot S&D and click
Dialers.sbi.

For example:
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/DialerOffline.html
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/DialerActiveX.html
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/DialXS.html

Anti-virus alone will not protect you from this kind of parasite. See:
http://boards.cexx.org/viewtopic.php?t=957

 

[Demons Eye]

Quoth the raven named Rez Manzoori:


Go get Spybot S&D. It finds many rogue dialers and removes them.
AdAware is good too for spyware, but I don't think it does dialers.
Spybot also finds common software keyloggers.

LavaSoft Ad-aware 6 does dialers and you can simply letting remove that
nasty things.
It also has a future of Ad-watch 3 which recognises all pop-ups or scripts
what are trying to do what you don't want to ...