Scareware

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, a resident of Washington state sued the company over allegations that it scares customers into purchasing its products, even when unnecessary.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will partially recoup some 300,000 people who fell victim to a scam in which they purchased rogue anti-virus products to fix problems that didn't exist.

The FBI, with the help of international partners, has broken up two criminal rings believed to be responsible for peddling scareware, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.

Scareware has taken on a human face. Criminals posing as computer security engineers are having success in calling victims at home and stealing their money, according to a survey issued Thursday by Microsoft. Fifteen percent of 7,000 computer users polled in the United States, Canada, U.K. and Ireland said they have been been contacted by a phone scammer, and 22 percent of those were tricked into following the fraudsters' directions, which included giving them remote access to a computer or providing credit card information. Seventy-nine percent of those suffered a financial loss as a result. Victims were out an average $875 in the United States, the survey found.

Apple on Tuesday released a Mac OS X security update to automatically find and remove rogue anti-virus (AV) software known as scareware. The update contains two "file quarantine" capabilities, as well as a "malware removal" functionality. Ongoing rogue AV scams targeting the Mac OS X, the most popular of which is MacDefender, have grown increasingly nefarious in recent days, leading to a significant uptick in infections. The malware aims to trick users into believing their systems are infected so they purchase phony AV products.

We all know about fake anti-virus, but fake support desk scammers are also making loads of money.

A trio of men have been indicted for their alleged role in a highly profitable, Ukraine-based "scareware" scheme that tricked unwitting users into purchasing more than one million fake anti-virus programs, resulting in an estimated $100 million in losses to victims.

Security experts warned on Monday that attackers are targeting users of BitTorrent, a file-sharing application, in a novel scam that attempts to panic them into spending cash to avoid fines and imprisonment.

An ongoing attack on Google users is sending victims to rogue AV software sites, according to researchers at eSoft's Threat Prevention Team.