scareware

In the course of an investigation police in the US and seven other states seized computers and servers used to run a "scareware" scheme which brought its masterminds more than $72 million from victims scammed into purchasing fake antivirus software.

In a Wednesday statement the US Justice Department said that 22 computers and servers were seized in the United States and 25 others in France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Kaspersky Lab has developed an app for the iPhone to allow users to fight blocker programs that restrict the access to PCs and through racketeering require to pay for being unlocked. Kaspersky Deblocker provides users with the code to get rid of the blocking banner without paying any money to cyber criminals. The app can be downloaded from the App Store.

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.

Scammers Marc D’Souza and his father, Maurice D’Souza, who operated an online “scareware” scheme, were ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay more than $8 million to settle charges of using deceptive ads to trick people into thinking their computers were infected with malicious software, and then sold them software to “fix” their non-existent problem.

The settlement was announced this week and the fine imposed on the defendant would be used to reimburse victims of the scam.

A new deceptive trick was created by the scammers who develop scareware. The new malicious code called by specialists as Zeven was developed by fraudsters to automatically detect a user's browser before serving up a warning page that poses as the genuine pages generated by IE, Firefox or Chrome. Victims are warned about the putative infection in their systems to lure them into installing a fake anti-virus software package, called Win7 AV. Such warnings are generated from malicious scripts planted on compromised websites.

A new malware was developed by cyber crooks to lure unwitting users into uninstalling legitimate anti-virus applications and instead using fake and useless software. A bogus package dubbed AnVi Antivirus generates a message that suggest that legitimate apps are “uncertified" and ought to be removed. Further the message threatens that if a user fails to take action his/her computer performance will degrade.

A Washington Post security blogger Brian Krebs found that scareware victims in most cases do not claw back credit card payments for worthless software packages. Krebs contacted victims of scareware scams according to the list of users duped into buying rogue anti-virus packages. The data came from caches of data maintained by rogue anti-virus affiliates, a key sales channel for scareware developers.

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.

The mostly costly scam in 2010 according to McAfee report will be fake antivirus applications that prompt Internet subscribers to download malicious software under guise of anti-virus protection and pay their own money for such bogus products.

The report reveals that cyber crooks earn more than $300 million from luring unwitting users into downloading scareware. Over the past two years scareware grew by 660% while during the past 12 months it increased by 400%.

 Click Forensics®, Inc. today released advertising audience quality figures for the third quarter 2009 from the industry’s leading independent online advertising and click fraud data reporting service. Now in its fourth year, the Click Forensics reporting service provides statistically significant data collected from Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines as well as comparison shopping engines and social networks. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is reflected in the data.

 According to the figures provided by Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) the number of scareware packages increased to tremendous values. The report says that in the first half of 2009 alone 485,000 different samples were detected. It is more than five fold of the combined figure for the whole of 2008.

The group says that the high figures are explained by the hacker practice of changing the checksum of every file. The tactic is designed to foil less sophisticated anti-malware defences.

 Scareware slingers have poisoned search results for Google Wave in a bid to expose users seeking the communication software to a fake anti-virus scan instead.