A Hijacking By The Smart HDD Virus

The virus last month attacked a PC that was built in the CRN Test Center lab, running Windows 7 Ultimate, and provided a quick lesson on how refined its developers have made this piece of malware.

Viruses can generally be avoided by running any of the industry’s top anti-virus applications and won’t become a problem. But if the Smart HDD gets through it can ruin an entire afternoon.

As it happened, in the middle of switching from a Trend Micro A/V application to a Panda A/V application -- a span of about 10 minutes -- a reboot caused a nasty error message to pop up on the screen: “Hard disk error. Drive cannot be found.”

Clicking out of the error message didn’t help. Attempts to open most applications on the PC didn’t work. Browsers including Chrome or Firefox failed to open, and the hard drive error messages persisted -- including one that advised that the hard drive was in danger of failing.

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(Among the “features” of Smart HDD is that it blocks almost all applications from launching. However, we were able to run Internet Explorer 8 even with Smart HDD keeping the other browsers from opening up.)

Additional messages began to inform that a PC performance analysis found a number of errors and defragmentation would be required. Clicking those messages led to another one that was a nice indication that it was malware: it told us that the drive could be saved by cleaning up “bad sectors” after clicking on a link registering the Windows system performance application.

All of the error messages were designed to look like actual Windows error messages, and they came pretty close.

Smart HDD was removed from the system by rebooting, installing Panda Antivirus Pro 2011, and doing a system scan and clean. Problem solved.

Viruses hit PCs every day, but the takeaway from Smart HDD is that their developers continue to improve their methods and even their art work. The error messages were much closer to authentic than others we’ve seen in memory.