dialer?

Today, my dad told me to quit looking at porn because he got the phone bill and it has charges of $120 on it. Under Phone Called on the phone bill it says SAOTOME. He says it is an international porn website. First of all, I haven't been looking at porn sites! Second, I did a google search for SAOTOME and it returned nothing. I dont want to go to SAOTOME.com to actually see if this is a site or not. Would this constitute a dialer? How did I get infected? Will ZoneAlarm give me sufficient protection against this in the future? This supposedly happened on January 10, which is before I installed ZoneAlarm and AVG. Is there any way to despute this with the phone company?

 

Isn't SAOTOME japanese? Anyway, I'm not sure if you can get the phone company to do anything about it but I do know ZA and AVG won't protect you against dialers. I would suggest to unplug you phone from you computer. That's the same thing I told my brother in law. He think he has a dialer also. omeone else should be around shortly to help you in this more that I can. I just know from readin TDS does find dialers and so does Trojan Hunter. Both have a free trial.

 

São Tomé . Africa {offshore}

Its a dialer. This type of hijacking could happen to anyone so please don't feel bad.
Instead remove the Dialer. Try Spyblaster.
If that does not world try a trial version of a good trogan remover . If that does not work you may want to consider a re-format which is alot cheaper than your phone bill

Tighten your setting in Internet Explorer to help prevent this in the future.
Have the phone company block the phone number. .

 

"Domain name registry for the Sao Tome domain, .st. "Anybody in the world can register a .ST domain. Although the .ST domain is the country code top-level domain for Sao Tome and Principe, any corporation or individual in the world can register a domain ending with {>.ST<} "

Countless other countries use this server.
Japan, NZ, Sweden, etc.

 

Alittle correction in order regarding my last post: "people" in those listed countries use that domain. Not the "country" inself.

 

you might want to take a look at this document for some info about dialers and fwiw it says you should dispute the charge. http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:154ytSMRF_EJ:www.scscc.com/bkk/Dialers%2520at%2520Bay,%2520How%2520to%2520Keep%2520the.pdf+dialers%2Bspyware&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

See if you can get an evaluation copy of TDS antitrojan (there's a support forum here for it if you have any questions), update it from the site, and run a scan to see if you can clean up your machine.

Also, get, update and run SpyBot Search and Destroy, an antispyware app. Perhaps also Adaware, a similar app. Both free.

You can get info about and recommendations for antispyware and antitrojan apps from the Wilders site: http://www.wilders.org/index.htm They also provide links to the apps so you can find them easily on the net.

As the document I linked to indicated, allowing ActiveX enabled in the internet zone is a common way of getting dialers (although perhaps downloading questionable files might be another way as with all malware). I would however go further than the paper does and suggest that even allowing ActiveX controls to be downloaded and run that are marked "safe" or 'signed" is not a good idea. I have mine set to prompt and use sparely. Some people find it a bit of a pain, but the alternative is to disable them entirely and put really trusted sites in IE's trusted zone where the settings are less restrictive. This alternative actually is a better alternative from a safety point of view.

Tighten up your browser settings and use SpywareBlaster which should block a lot of stuff in the future for prevention. SpywareGuard is another free app from the same author that helps against spyware. There is a support forum here also for those two apps.