A particularly bizarre piece of Trojan software is making the rounds, infecting PCs right and left. Called the MonaRonaDona virus, it is, in a way, it’s the world’s most persuasive “salesman”.

 

When your computer becomes infected, the following message appears: “Hi, My name is MonaRonaDona. I am a Virus & I am here to Wreck Your PC. If you observe strange behavior with your PC, like program windows disappearing etc, it’s me who is doing all this. I was created as a protest against the Human Right Violation being observed throughout the world & the very purpose of my existence is to remind & stress the world to respect humanity.”

 

The virus has a brilliant psychological social engineering aspect to it. Your natural inclination is to panic and use your favorite search engine to search on the name of the virus “MonaRonaDona”. The creators of this virus have cleverly scattered fake online stories and commentary about MonaRonaDona, all of which mentions the “cures” for the virus, which are in fact fake antivirus tools! One of them is called Unigray, which is conveniently available at the unigray.com website. And, oh yes, Unigray costs $39!

 

Unsuspecting users in a panic no doubt fork over the money immediately, download the bogus antivirus “cure”, run it and, sure enough, MonaRonaDona bites the dust. A fake virus eliminated by fake antivirus software!

 

But what does Unigray do? Does it secretly place a new, stealth virus on the PC to do some mischief later? Does it mail out spam for its creator if you walk away from your PC to eat lunch? No one yet knows.

 

And how does MonaRonaDona get on your PC to begin with? Researchers at anti-malware software provider Kaspersky Labs theorize that it may be installed when unsuspecting users looking for a bargain install and run a fake utility program called RegistryCleaner 2008.

 

Moral of the story? Stick with recognized names (Norton, McAfee (News - Alert), Kaspersky Labs) for utilities and anti-viral / anti-malware software.