Not sure if you saw my edit since it was after you replied, but you might want to edit the post to change the .'s in the URL to [dot] so it doesn't linkify a likely malware link for other users.
From the instructions, I would say they are trying to convince them to hack themselves (and yes, I know, that's how 95% of hacking works... But is that only me, or this one is so obvious that it hurts?)
DO NOT FOLLOW THESE PROMPTS. This is a malicious prompt. It places malicious content in your clipboard, and requesting that you paste it into command prompt or powershell, which will infect you.
Possibly.
BTW, certain malware may be able to break out of a VM.
On the other, some malware may recognize that it is being run in a VM and do absolutely nothing to avoid analysis.
I have no idea how somebody might come up with this braindead, unintuitive and irreproducable mnemonic for a JavaScript interpreter but it sounds very much like something Microsoft would do.
I'm curious what the script does, I'd love to reverse engineer it but don't want to risk accidentally executing anything. Anyone with a disposable VM care to take the risk?
It's bad that this scam is running of course but, I have to say this particular scam has almost a nostalgic quality to it. It reminds me of the type of trickery that old school malware back in the day used to rely on to get on to people's computers. It's kind of quaint how unsophisticated it is and how much active work it requires of the victim to successfully infect them.
“A way out west there was this fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, like-wise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.”
Yea good thing you didn’t. MSHTA is the app that lets you run Microsoft HTML Apps (usually used for their help articles). Those can contain JavaScript or VBScript code. And since you’re pasting it in a Run box it’ll happily execute it, even if it’s a remote source.
Generally it would only run as your user (you’re not admin are you?), which would still be enough to make your life miserable, but it could also try to run known exploits and raise itself to admin and own your whole computer.
Why wouldn't a windows user be running as admin lol its windows. That said most of what you value is already in your user account anyway and privilege escalations are hardly unknown as well.
It's on some keyboards and opens the start menu on windows. It can, of course, also be used on Linux, because it's just a key on a keyboard. For example, in Gnome it opens the overview per default (where you see all the windows as small tiles and can use the app search).
It absolutely is malware. The Text you see is a comment appended to the end of a command that'll download malicious software. The comment is placed in such a way that the command is out of frame.