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Fake Antivirus Overwhelming Scanners
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Rogue or bogus programs passing themselves off as real antivirus software have been one of the malware themes of 2009, but the APWG's numbers for the first half of the year show that the organisation's members detected 485,000 samples, more than five times the total for the whole of 2008."
I'm pretty sure that Antivirus 2009 has protected me from emerging threats quite reliably.
It makes sence to make a virus like this. My buddy got one. It said you have a virus pay us $X for full version of Anti-Virus program to remove it. It was a real pain to remove as I remember.
I know, I have naively installed Symantec on my computer too...
In interesting news, a fake antivirus has caused quite the riot with women in their mid-twenties. Due to unemployed data operations programmers trying to earn some money to at least pay their bills, they have created a fake antivirus much like Windows Antivirus 2009. However, this pseudo-antivirus program is smart and employs unique data mining technologies to determine which users are likely to be attractive women in their late teens to late twenties. These victims are then targeted and scammed.
The women are targeted with an algorithm that determines how much proportional web browsing is carried out on Myspace, Facebook, email, and on online clothing shopping sites. By using a modified log-normal distribution, ex-programmers were able to create a model that determined which users were of the targeted age group 86% of the time and which were hot 49% of the time. With the statistical combination, the "antivirus" program learned which users were "hot women" and instructed them to sit on their scanners with their skirts and underwear removed, or else their computers would go up in smoke. As such the demographic is generally technically illiterate, the women have been doing so, scammers have been receiving really nice butt-on-glass pictures, and the scanners themselves--especially the ones marked "HP"--have been completely overwhelmed.