Rogue anti-spyware scams becoming worse

Rogue anti-spyware scams have been known for ages now. They are essentially intimidating users into buying a bogus program. Recently, however, these scams have reached a whole different and quite troubling level. "They were typically one-off-type scams. We have never seen a malicious campaign using rogue anti-spyware of this magnitude before …. SecureWorks has personally seen 10 different content providers affected by this campaign and our outside sources tell us that they have worked with another 20 or so, but we suspect it is affecting dozens of Web sites," said Don Jackson of SecureWorks.

The scam works as follows: Hackers set up rogue anti-spyware websites, buy advertising from legitimate websites or advertising companies that deal with these websites, the ads are randomly infected with malicious code and they appear as pop-up alerts, which say something like "you have spyware on your computer, use *generic security program name* to clean it", but to clean it, of course, you have to buy it and provide credit card details in the process. In case that’s not enough, you get a free Trojan together with the fake program.

Simply put, you get fooled three times and can loose money on three different occasions: you pay for a fake tool, you provide credit card details and let a Trojan inside, which can result in many things none of which are good.

SecureWorks encourages owners of websites to constantly monitor the ads they are running.

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