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1. Another Cheap Shot from the House of Malware – Scareware

   sujata on December 9th, 2009

   Tags: gizmodo, malware, nyt, ransomware, scareware, virus

   Everyone’s experienced it: you visit a webpage and a flashing banner on top that looks like a Windows dialog box informs you (falsely) that a virus has been discovered on your system and it invites you to click on it to help you disinfect. When you press on it though you are taken to a website that will in all probability download a computer virus to infect your heretofore clean system. They have a name for it now: it is called Scareware – probably because it achieves its ends through scaring people into playing into the hands of the exploiters. What the manipulators have in mind, could be anything from trying to sell you useless software, right down to obtaining your cooperation for installing malware on your computer. Published statistics say that this is quite a popular way these days in which to attack computers or make an easy buck; there has been a fourfold increase in programs of this kind that float about on the Internet in the past year alone – there are about 10,000 of these now abroad. They also use the term Scareware for legitimate security programs like antivirus software too that try to put up a show of doing a good job by constantly alerting the user to every little unremarkable thing in an alarmist way. A similar-sounding but unrelated term is Ransomware – a virus that holds your system to ransom threatening to erase everything unless you pay up.

   A well-publicised case of Scareware recently visited visitors to the technology blog Gizmodo. Apparently, >malware programmers bought advertising space on the website, posing to be a well-known company. When visitors clicked on the advertisement though, they ended up downloading malware. >A similar attack occurred on the website of the New York Times publication last month too. Perhaps the best answer to these hit-and-run attacks is to use premium antivirus software: that way you would not ever be tempted to check out substandard antivirus findings on websites and would be protected from them if you still were.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Computer Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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