Bogus Security Software Peddlers Fined $8.2 Million

[duncan]

http://www.infopacke...8_2_million.htm

[alfred]

http://www.infopacke...8_2_million.htm

 

What blows my mind is that they actually distributed more than a million copies, that is mind numbing. Trying to distribute a legitimate product is apparently much, much harder :>

 

Best,

al

[ritchie58]

A friend of mine made the very bad mistake of downloading Antivirus XP a few months back. He too was lured in installing it with the results of the bogus scan. As the name implies he also thought the AV was an affiliate of Microsoft. It didn't take him long at all to realize that he had indeed installed "scareware" since according to the program you had to purchase the paid version to delete the threats it found. Plus it caused his PC to slow to a snail's pace. He tried to remove it by traditional means but kept getting popups saying: Your PC is Infected! Click here to delete these threats! It turned out to be such a tenacious program that he eventually had to do a complete reinstall of his OS. A good lesson learned for him I believe.

[alfred]

A friend of mine made the very bad mistake of downloading Antivirus XP a few months back. He too was lured in installing it with the results of the bogus scan. As the name implies he also thought the AV was an affiliate of Microsoft. It didn't take him long at all to realize that he had indeed installed "scareware" since according to the program you had to purchase the paid version to delete the threats it found. Plus it caused his PC to slow to a snail's pace. He tried to remove it by traditional means but kept getting popups saying: Your PC is Infected! Click here to delete these threats! It turned out to be such a tenacious program that he eventually had to do a complete reinstall of his OS. A good lesson learned for him I believe.

 

That's a pretty familiar tale, it's a shame it's so common. The ending though I think illustrates the toughest part of AV - removal. Detection is a tough problem don't get me wrong but it's fairly straight forward and it's not particularly broad in scope in that it is generally reviewing one file at a time. Removal from an infected system requires the AV to be concerned with removal of the correct artifacts and processes (from the threat) and often has to remove them in the correct order. Worse though is that removal often needs to deal with a threat that is hostile to it and intent on thwarting removal. I'm simplifying removal for the sake of brevity but IMO it's a very tough problem to solve and it's a problem where the user *really* needs their vendor to excel because the alternative is, well, reinstalling your system.

 

al