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scareware

This tag is associated with 2 posts

Scareware Purveyors, Spammers, and Crooks Take Advantage of Haiti Earthquake

By Prefect ⋅ January 14, 2010 ⋅ One comment

The worst earthquake in that area for 200 years, a magnitude 7.0, hit Haiti late Tuesday afternoon leaving areas like the capital of Port-au-Prince in ruins and many people in need. Predictably people are looking for ways to help and are using Google to search for relief agencies that can take donations to help the affected. Bad actors have taken advantage of this by engaging in search engine poisoning including taking over existing web sites, using techniques that boost search ranking, and installing malicious software using scareware tactics on user’s PC’s. They also set up fake donation web sites. Finally, they employ Spam e-mail, Twitter messages, and related electronic communication methods in order to direct users to these web sites.

Facebook’s Faith: A New Scareware Attack

By Prefect ⋅ October 1, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

On Thursday morning, AVG researcher Roger Thompson, after sourcing some spyware attacks to a series of Facebook profiles, noted that these few hundred profiles were showing up with the same profile image (seen at left) but different profile information. The home video link on these profiles, belonging to Faith / Emily / whoever, points to the a web site that displays scareware dialogs.

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