Scareware stalled?
By Bala Shah

For many in the online security industry, spam, malware and scareware seem to have few long term solutions. 

Enigma Software has published research on how FBI’s raids on Scareware organizations and the arrest of ChronoPay CEO Pavel Vrublevsky have resulted in a dramatic drop in fake Anti-Spyware Attacks.

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This summer’s crackdown on computer scareware companies around the world along with the arrest of ChronoPay’s CEO Pavel Vrublevsky has virtually shut the fake security software business down…for now. For those of you who don’t know, scareware (or rogue anti-spyware program) is a type of malicious software that tricks people into thinking they have a malware infection. The software claims to find security risks and asks for cash to fix them. If you pay (sometimes as much as $129), the ‘problem’ temporarily goes away. If you don’t pay, your computer will be bombarded with pop-ups that warning you about the problem and make your computer virtually impossible to use. How do people get this malicious software on their computers in the first place? Usually by visiting untrusted web sites or clicking on advertisements that redirect to web pages that pretend to be an online malware scanner. It’s a multi-million dollar industry that is run, for the most part, out of Russia where scammers are out of reach of law enforcement.

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