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FBI Warns About the Scareware Threat
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Posted by Donster on: 2009-12-14 17:33:57 308
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By Lucian Constantin @ Softpedia News
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued a scareware alert through the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The advisory describes the aggressive tactics used in these scams and estimates that they caused losses of over $150 million to victims.
Scareware, also known as rogueware, is a term used to refer to fake antivirus products that trick users into paying for license fees by bombarding them with false security alerts. This sort of schemes are so profitable that cybercrooks have built an entire underground economy based on it.
Some cybercriminal gangs offer scareware deployment services through their own malware infrastructure, while others get paid big bucks to launch blackhat search engine optimization (BHSEO) campaigns in order to poison search engine results for popular terms. Scareware is so prevalent these days that there is no single attack vector to watch for.
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News Source: Email
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