FBI Shuts Down Major Scareware Gang

Trailrunner7 writes "The FBI has made a major dent in the huge scareware and rogue antivirus problem, arresting two people and seizing dozens of computers, servers and bank accounts as part of a large-scale coordinated operation in twelve countries. The operation, which involved authorities in the United States, Germany, France, Latvia, the UK and several other nations, was designed to disrupt the scareware ecosystem that has been preying on users' security fears in an effort to scam them out of millions of dollars in licensing fees for useless or outright malicious software."

Comments

Now they've removed the bin.laden filter

[VIPERsssss]

...Echelon has more clock cycles available.

Re:Now they've removed the bin.laden filter

[swb]

So if people were smarter, they wouldn't walk by the park and night which would keep them from being targets of mugging, which in turn will make muggers become more productive citizens?

I agree with the idea that capturing one group will result in a second group popping up, but the same is true with crime -- arresting people who commit $criminal_offense won't stop $criminal_offense from occurring.

I do believe, though, that there are a lot of people profiting on cyber crime who sit in the middle and make money off it, while being able to claim they aren't involved -- the banks, the credit card companies, the hosting companies, the ISPs who turn a blind eye and provide the air and water that criminals need to be criminals.

What I'd like to see are RICO prosecutions where the otherwise "legitimate" entities who claim ignorance get prosecuted. I think you'd quickly end up with a lot more self-policing by the passive beneficiaries.

I'd also like to see a little more regulation on the credit card side of things -- why can't I arbitrarily limit what countries or states my credit card is good in? If credit cards by default didn't work overseas -- you had to call 1-800 and get them enabled in the specific countries you wanted them to work in -- that would help, too.

If you can make it harder to charge a credit card overseas, wire transfer money, etc, you might make it harder to profit from these kinds of crimes.

well crap!

[uncanny]

Now who's going to fix the virus that a virus scanner on a porn-site-popup tells me that i have?

I can't believe this.

[Bobakitoo]

I can't believe they have shutdown Symentec. I am forwarding this to everyone!