Trying not to buy into scareware

Just surf the net and you’ll be offered plenty of opportunity to buy into some bogus antivirus promotions. Even legitimate web sites are teeming with these scareware pitches. If you click on one of the links to learn more about “protecting” your hard drive, you’ll get bombarded with continued sales pitches – even if you decline purchase. If you do make the purchase then all you’ll end up with is some cyber snake oil for your PC – no real antivirus protection. You will have added to the coffers of the scareware purveyors though. Earning over six figures in a week’s worth of commissions is tempting any time, and it must be especially hard to resist in this economy. Some of these scareware suppliers can reportedly earn over $100,000 in weekly commission!

I knew scareware was rampant, but when I read Byron Acohido’s “Scareware’s pitches for fake security show up in odd places” at usatoday.com, I learned how widespread it really is. These links show up at every turn; you can get accosted at legitimate websites via pop-up ads that link to corrupted web pages, you can be tempted at sites like the ubiquitous YouTube, Twitter, and via online advertisements and even after making a seemingly innocuous search query. This has folks like Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs on alert. I like his advice, “This issue is not specific to one company, and we encourage people to be vigilant about checking the URLs (Web links) of the websites they visit."

In just the past two months “AVG's free LinkScanner tool, which prevents users from clicking on malicious Web links, has been flushing out — on a daily basis — more than 30,000 Web pages displaying ordinary-looking ads embedded with hidden scareware triggers. Earlier this year the daily average was roughly 5,000” according to Roger Thompson, senior researcher at AVG.

I hate that the onus has to be on the consumer, but we simply have to be aware so we don’t fall victim. Public awareness is the only way scareware can be confronted and thwarted.