'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' Pop-Ups

The 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups are phishing tactics that claim that your PC is compromised by a 'Zeus Virus,' referencing a notorious, spyware-based threat. After gaining access to the user through the fake support lines the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups promote, a threat actor may request money or try to gain deeper access to your PC. Use suitably cautious Web-browsing habits for avoiding these attacks and security software to remove the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups if they continue launching.

The Shadows of Zeus Cast over Your Browser

Threat actors who have an unimpressive damage potential to offer with their skill set sometimes prefer to borrow the reputations and accompanying notoriety of other con artists. Such wholesale theft of dubious reputations is easy to see with attacks like the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups, which require the victim to be semi-aware of the Keylogger Zeus's existence, but not enough to identify what's happening accurately. Malware analysts can confirm these attacks appearing in different, Windows-compatible browsers since 2015 and ongoing to the present day.

The 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups may launch from various websites, and sometimes include backgrounds formatted to look identical to a Windows 'Blue Screen of Death' or BSOD. However, the primary contents of the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups may load through additional dialogue boxes. These secondary windows deliver warnings that the PC is under assault by a variant of Zeus (which the threat refers to as being a virus, although Keylogger Zeus is a form of spyware that omits any virus-based features), and ask you to contact a phone number for recovery assistance.

Although the accompanying, fake technical support hotline the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups include is a standard phishing attempt, the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups also include a highly suspicious warning: the supposedly upcoming deletion of your entire hard drive.

Erasing the Genuine Problem of a Fake Virus

The 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups may redirect any victims to their 'toll-free' numbers for the con artists to gain backdoor access to your computer. This level of access often escalates into further attacks that may include:

• Con artists may install real spyware or other types of threatening software on your PC automatically.
• Con artists may pretend to find problems with your computer and request payment for providing fake repair, system-cleaning or anti-malware assistance.
• Vital security settings related to networking activities, such as the Windows Firewall and Remote Desktop Protocols, may suffer from various unsafe modifications.

Most importantly, the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups are incapable of following through on their threats of the upcoming erasure of the associated PC's hard drive. Regardless of the contents of its pop-ups and notification windows, you always can navigate away from a suspicious Web page or close it forcibly, such as with the Task Manager. Since these Web pages may be using drive-by-downloads or other attacks, malware experts recommend examining any exposed PCs with anti-malware products to confirm the removing of any the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups permanently.

Sometimes, a little knowledge is worse than total ignorance. Users who surf the Web without knowing about the appropriate standards for BSoDs, and similar alerts, risk taking advice from the worst sources, like the 'Your Hard drive will be DELETED' pop-ups.