‘Win an iPhone!’ Pop-Up Ads

Posted: January 27, 2014

Threat Metric

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The following fields listed on the Threat Meter containing a specific value, are explained in detail below:

Threat Level: The threat level scale goes from 1 to 10 where 10 is the highest level of severity and 1 is the lowest level of severity. Each specific level is relative to the threat's consistent assessed behaviors collected from SpyHunter's risk assessment model.

Detection Count: The collective number of confirmed and suspected cases of a particular malware threat. The detection count is calculated from infected PCs retrieved from diagnostic and scan log reports generated by SpyHunter.

Volume Count: Similar to the detection count, the Volume Count is specifically based on the number of confirmed and suspected threats infecting systems on a daily basis. High volume counts usually represent a popular threat but may or may not have infected a large number of systems. High detection count threats could lay dormant and have a low volume count. Criteria for Volume Count is relative to a daily detection count.

Trend Path: The Trend Path, utilizing an up arrow, down arrow or equal symbol, represents the level of recent movement of a particular threat. Up arrows represent an increase, down arrows represent a decline and the equal symbol represent no change to a threat's recent movement.

% Impact (Last 7 Days): This demonstrates a 7-day period change in the frequency of a malware threat infecting PCs. The percentage impact correlates directly to the current Trend Path to determine a rise or decline in the percentage.

Ranking:	700
Threat Level:	2/10
Infected PCs:	54,498

First Seen:	January 27, 2014
Last Seen:	October 17, 2023
OS(es) Affected:	Windows

The 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements are advertisements that usually are lures for phishing attacks, online survey misleading tactics and other types of PC threats. Since the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements are a very generic and widely-used type of online strategy, malware experts can't offer any specific information on the risks of individual outbreaks. However, any contact with the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements should be kept to a bare minimum, and any software that causes repeated 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements to load should be considered nothing less than threats to be uninstalled with a good PC security product.

When Winning an iPhone Gets You Something Else in the Bargain

A minority of the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements may be legitimate, but the majority are known for being initial steps in attempts to compromise PCs, steal privileged information or induce activities that aren't beneficial to the audience (but profitable to the advertiser). The 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements is a broad classification for a PC threat, but, as far as malware experts have found, the recurring consequences of interacting with such an advertisement often narrow down to one of two possibilities:

Phishing scams. These variants of the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements may pretend to offer a free prize, but only will relent after you exchange privileged data, such as your phone number, street address and e-mail address. This information may be distributed to spammers and other advertising partners with poor reputations. Particularly bold examples of the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements-based phishing attacks may attempt to compromise your bank account and/or credit card.
The 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements also may redirect you to online surveys. These surveys may not provide the user with any benefits, but pay the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements's advertisers upon completion. However, the misleading circumstances around the surveys may lead participants to believe that they can be awarded with iPhones and other free prizes after completion.

The 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements, like any online dishonest practice, also have the risk of being used to distribute threatening software, although malware researchers note that this isn't one of the most likely possibilities from these hoaxes.

The Proper Response to an Advertisement that Offers You Something for Nothing

Freebiescout.com and other sites known for participating in the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements-related scams should be ignored as the suspicious entities that they are, regardless of how tempting their offers might be. If you've given privileged information away to companies related to the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements, that information may be compromised. Malware researchers would recommend that you keep an eye on all related bank accounts, credit cards and e-mail accounts for potential misuse of funds and/or attempts to distribute spam-based attacks. While the information, once compromised, can't be retrieved, you particularly should consider contacting any relevant financial institutions for further advice.

In other cases, when the level of deceit is 'mildly' threatening rather than extremely so, the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements are simple redirects to surveys that may not cause any further harm to your computer. However, since the ties between online scammers and threat authors hardly are nonexistent, malware researchers would consider it best to use anti-malware scans for any PC that comes into contact with the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements.
All normal measures of blocking unsafe advertisements, such as disabling exploited scripts, should be considered useful for blocking the 'Win an iPhone!' pop-up advertisements.

Technical Details

Additional Information

The following URL's were detected:

http://poshukach.com/search?poshukach.com