All of the sudden, a beautiful blonde pops up and she promises to remove her lingerie if you help her. Of course you will. It’s human nature to enjoy a strip show. Especially when it’s free. Unfortunately, there is no free beer and the blonde is interested in your brain. The one on your shoulders.
The creation of online scammers, she's trying to trick unsuspecting internet users into helping the scammers break the online barriers that banks and e-mail services set up to thwart crooks.
The striptease is the latest attempt to defeat so-called CAPTCHA systems, which is short for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." Those safeguards require users to prove they are human by reading oddly shaped jumbles of letters and numbers that appear in an image and typing them out.
In the new scam, an icon of an alluring woman suddenly appears on a Windows computer infected by a virus. After clicking on the icon, the user sees a photo of the woman who vows to take off an article of clothing each time the jumble of figures next to her is entered.
But the woman never fully undresses, and after several passwords are entered the program restarts, possibly enticing unsuspecting users into trying again.
Trend Micro researchers said the scam appears to be isolated for now to spammers trying to register bogus e-mail addresses and flood chat rooms with unwanted pitches. But they worry schemes to infiltrate financial institutions could soon appear.
Paul Ferguson, network architect at Trend Micro, speculated that spammers might be using the results to write a program to automatically bypass CAPTCHA systems.
"I have to hand it to them," Ferguson said, laughing. "The social engineering aspect here is pretty clever."
