Maybe you’ve seen it before – a pop up window that alerts you that your computer has been infected by a virus or worm, offering to stop the threat if you click. What would likely happen next? You’d find yourself unable to access any other useful programs or websites until you activated the recommended program, which of course asks for your credit card info. How could people fall for such an obvious ploy? Desperation and fear.
“Surprisingly, many users fall victim to these attacks and pay to register the Fake AV,” Google said.
On Tuesday, Google announced that such fake software security programs, which not only don’t help but actually infect computers, are a growing online threat. Their analysis of 240 million Web pages over the past 13 months revealed that fake anti-virus programs accounted for 15 percent of malicious software it detected.
“The Fake AV threat is rising in prevalence,” Google said in its findings. “Clearly, there is a definitive upward trend in the number of new Fake AV domains that we encounter each week.”
Fake anti-virus (AV) scams sell victims programs that hackers claim will fix the purported problems but which in fact usually plant nefarious computer code on machines. Such transactions can also leave credit card information in the hands of cyber crooks, but if you’re lucky, you’ve only just paid to infect your computer.
“To add insult to injury, Fake AVs often are bundled with other malware, which remains on a victim’s computer regardless of whether a payment is made.”
Google has refined tools to filter out booby-trapped Websites and hackers have evidently responded by flitting from one domain name to another, with internet speed. The best way to avoid these is have a good anti-virus program you can trust and then don’t believe scary pop-ups.
Tags: Google, Internet Speed, Virus and Anti-Virus