Fake Antivirus Peddlers Outpacing Real AV Firms

An anonymous reader tips a writeup at KrebsOnSecurity.com detailing how purveyors of fake antivirus or 'scareware' programs have aggressively stepped up their game to evade detection. The posting is based on a report from Google's malware detection team (PDF). "Beginning in June 2009, Google charted a massive increase in the number of unique fake antivirus installer programs, a spike that Google security experts posit was a bid to overwhelm the ability of legitimate antivirus programs to detect the programs. Indeed, the company discovered that during that time frame, the number of unique installer programs increased from an average of 300 to 1,462 per day, causing the detection rate to plummet to below 20 percent. ... In addition, Google determined that the average lifetime of sites that redirect users to Web pages that try to install scareware decreased over time, with the median lifetime dropping below 100 hours around April 2009, below 10 hours around September 2009, and below one hour since January 2010."

Comments

Re:Why use an unknown AV program?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Because AntiVirus 2010 has just detected dozens or even hundreds of critical security threats that your existing AV has missed!

What upgrade could be more sensible?

We've had a couple of these

[IICV]

We've had a couple of these at work - not fake AVs, but some weird thing that seems to change the Active Desktop so that it looks like there's an antivirus window.

The funny thing is that they look a lot more like an anti-virus program than our actual antivirus. They have this really slick fake "scanning" window that looks like something Apple would come up with if they had to design an AV scanner, while our real AV software looks like a piece of junk some poor Russian hacker cobbled together. It's sad really; the fake AVs have Symantec beat in everything from total resource usage to looks.

Fake dope dealers

[oldhack]

So it's like fake dope dealers are outpacing true dope dealers.

EXCUSE ME SIR!

[ElectricTurtle]

Pardon me, sir, but I would be remiss if I didn't inform you that you have clearly contracted a rare disease that will kill you painfully in short order UNLESS you pay me to inject this substance into you. You can trust me, I'm a doctor.

....

Why is it that virtually nobody would fall for that in meatspace, but innumerable people fall for it online? It's just like the 419 scams. What is it about THE INTARWEBS that makes people exponentially more gullible than they would be to a random person on the street?