Font Wasn’t Found Malware

As usual there’ll always be someone out there trying to either get at what’s your or find ways of filling your screen with as much spam and adverts as possible. The reason why they do the latter is simple; ‘they receive commission on each advert that is clicked’ and, without realising it, you will click, or should I say the malware will click them all.

Lately, due to more people being aware of malware and viruses, it’s become more difficult for the creators of this type of intrusive software to install it on your system. To get around this they have devised a tactic that gets you, the user, to unwittingly install the malware.The most common of these at the moment (03/2017) is to show a warning when attempting to view a webpage informing you that you do not have the correct font installed on your system and that you will not be able to view the web page until it has been installed. At the moment it seems to be limited to Google Chrome web Browsers but it won’t be long before it appears within other browsers. The warning looks very convincing, the box that appears looks genuine and the webpage that you are trying to view looks as though it is missing the correct font, some of the text having been substituted by question marks, diamond shapes etc (see pic below).

If you see anything that looks like this, no matter what site you are trying to view or browser you are using, don’t be tempted to follow the download and install instructions, it will end in tears. Rather than risk infection; make a note of the so called ‘missing fonts’ name and close the browser.

No web designer would ever create a site that didn’t contain web friendly and freely available fonts, what would be the point.

If you’ve already been caught out by this scam and found that your system has slowed down, homepage has been changed or you’re being bombarded by adverts, you’ll need to remove the malware. To do this I would recommend using a few programs; Superantipsyware and Malwarebytes Antimalware both of which are free, don’t click the free paid for trial version when installing, the free versions will do just fine. After installing, scanning and removing malware from your system I would recommend doing a full system scan with whatever antivirus software you have installed…better still, if your antivirus supports it, try doing a boot scan.

Hope this helps…Dave.