Scaring Us into Paying -- Redmondmag.com

Barney's Blog

Scaring Us into Paying

A couple weeks ago I was hit by a scareware virus, one that run fake virus scanners and fake alerts saying your system is infected. The alerts were correct, I was infected -- the scareware creeps are the ones that installed the virus.

And with the clever ones, you don't even have to click anything for installation. I got mine reading an old Hotmail message from my sister.

These tactics work. The FBI claims a pair of Latvian creeps pulled in nearly $75 million selling antivirus that only removed their virus. Now the young hackers are facing two decades in the hoosegow. Couldn't have happened to a nice pair of jerks.

Posted by Doug Barney on 06/29/2011 at 1:18 PM

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