Scareware, Fake AV Malware Incidences Falling

As per CEO Alvin Estevez of Enigma Software, fake anti-virus as well as other scareware applications appears as diminishing, at least for now, while cyber-crooks strive for regaining their businesses following raids that took place this summer. EWeek.com reported this on August 22, 2011.

Actually during the past several months, FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) raided cyber-criminals who spammed scareware, leading to a 60% reduction in bogus AV malicious software across the Web.

Meanwhile, to conduct the analysis, Enigma Software used its support logs, application identification as also its new clients' support tickets.

Consequently, the analysts elaborated that Web-surfers encountered pop-ups while browsing that asserted that their PCs were contaminated and that they could become free of the infections if they clicked on a given link. But, when clicked, a virus got downloaded which the scammers promised they could clean off for a payment.

And though fake anti-virus represents the commonest kind of scareware, other kinds can also be found like file-management programs and disk utilities.

According to Enigma, "Mac Defender," "XP Antispyware 2012" and "Vista Security 2012," the scareware applications that were most widely distributed are now diminishing. Actually, this June (2011), the FBI conducted a raid against malware purveyors across 12 countries of which USA was one as well as arrested Pavel Vrublevsy CEO of ChronoPay, whose Russian business understandably was responsible for several of the malware programs.

Besides, law enforcement officials within USA, UK, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Lithuania, France and Latvia confiscated around 40 PCs for busting a gang of cyber-criminals distributing scareware during the month.

The criminals, according to FBI, victimized almost 1m people and contaminated around 960,000 PCs, reaping some $72m. It also acquired hold over 5 bank accounts the gangsters utilized for transferring money amidst them.

Notably, McAfee too reported an enormous fall in the total number of consumers who informed about fake AV-identifications following June 2011.

Nevertheless, security researchers state that scareware developers and cyber-criminals are smart and do things very well suggesting that they'll return sometime soon for, they'll discover yet one more way for spreading their scareware as well as making their victims pay.

Related article: SecureWorks Identifies Bank and Information Stealing Trojan Coreflood

» SPAMfighter News - 8/31/2011