fake anti-virus

An online scam scheme sends junk email messages telling people that a hotel has mistakenly charged their credit card with a wrong payment. The result of being victimized is an infected PC.

According to reports the messages appeared on the net in recent days and so far there are hundreds of versions already. The main theme is: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.

According to the report provided by Sophos Naked Security blog a new phony anti-virus scam is infecting machines on the Internet in the guise of a Microsoft update. The fake Microsoft pop-up appears only on PCs using Firefox browser.

Sophos says that infected in drive-by downloads from compromised sites receive the scareware that appears as urgent update notifications. These updates are fake and only come to affected machines that use Firefox. Authentic updates from Microsoft come only through the Internet Explorer.

Cyber crooks unsurprisingly pounced on the tragedy in Japan using earthquake and tsunami reports for their own venal purposes. According to the reports by security researchers scams come ranging from links to fake anti-virus downloads and phony donation sites to classic online swindles that rely on greed.

Three men were accused by the US District Court in Chicago of running an operation that used fraudulent ads into installing over $100m worth of bogus anti-virus software. The 57-page indictment names Shaileshkumar P. Jain, 40, a US citizen who is believed to be living in Ukraine; James Reno, 26, of Amelia, Ohio; and Bjorn Daniel Sundin, 31, a Swedish citizen.