Fake Antivirus gets Sophisticated
Fake antivirus designers can get their work done in some ingenious ways. Around the time the British royal wedding spectacle was going on, one particular malware designer thought of a pretty clever way of exploiting the Royal wedding craze to his advantage.
He put up very a popular portrait of Princess Diana on a website (because he knew people would be searching for Princess Diana).
When people clicked on the website, they got redirected time and again until they suddenly found themselves on a website that came up with a very Microsoft-ey-looking dialog box – that said that their computer was infected, and they needed to pay $60 then and there to get rid of it.
This was fake antivirus, of course. And if nothing else, people can always tell a fake antivirus pitch by how they demand money right away. Reputable companies always offer you a free one month trial.
Anyway, reputable companies never pop up a warning like that. Fake antivirus isn’t some kind of fringe business. The FBI believes that they make will that’s the one billion-dollar industry every year.
They steal money, they take control of computers, they steal information, and they turn your computer into a kind of remote-controlled robot to make it send out lots of spam to everyone else.
The problem with fake antivirus is so bad, the normally immune Macintosh operating system has just had its first fake antivirus announced. [Score for Macintosh: 01, and Microsoft 10,000].
Fake antivirus makers use every trick in the book to get through. Sometimes, they use simple spam and online advertising.
At other times, they do it through actually calling you at home and asking you to visit their website for something or the other. Once you get there, you’ll find familiar fake antivirus running putting up.
Most of these attacks come from countries in Eastern Europe and China. There are set on stealing from the West. When fake software detects that your computer uses Chinese or Russian something, it just won’t try to steal from you.
Some of these businesses make such a great living from what they do. They try pushing fake software with convincing-sounding names like Win Drive Cleaner or XP Internet Security Organization and just get past a lot of people’s defenses.
And since they actually ask you for permission and get you to pay, your antivirus software is often a little unsure whether it needs to stop this thing that you paid money for.
Some of these organizations actually have 1000 employees and proper offices in Eastern Europe. Just imagine – some of these companies make $200 million a year. That’s more money than Twitter makes.
When these fake antivirus companies are so big, they can afford to constantly rewrite their malware code so that your antivirus software has a very hard time indeed detecting anything. As usual, personal vigilance is all that will protect you.
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