Researchers at SecureWorks say thousands of victims have been scammed already and there’s more to come. And, you guessed it – it’s Russia and Eastern European countries to blame. They are said to be using Russian Business Network (RBN) and other ISPs, hosting outlets to lure victims into clicking the malicious ads. Clicking on such advertisement opens a pop-up, reporting about the problems in user’s system and offers to purchase fake “anti-spyware” for a price ranging from about $20 to $80. Then “anti-spyware” downloads trojan (i.e. Zlob) or a rootkit (which gives the attacker remote control of the infected system). There are said to be more than 40 kinds of pesky anti-spyware at the moment.
This type of scam is believed to stick around, because so far it’s showing success. Not only scammers make money from selling fake “solutions”, but they also steal credit card information and gain access to the infected computers.
The RBN has been blamed of numerous cyberattacks before, including the hijacking of the Bank of India’s website.
January 17th, 2012 at 6:45 am
Oh, a great description! No idea how you wrote this post..it’d take me days. Well worth it though, I’d suspect. Have you considered selling ads on your blog?