30 mln PCs have fake antivirus, €10 mln profits for cyber-crooks

The number of infections caused by fake antiviruses continues to increase rapidly because the current economic crisis is forcing cyber-crooks to become more ingenious. The creators of these programs only have one aim: to profit financially from their creations and they are achieving this, according to Panda Security.
According to recent data from PandaLabs more than 30 mln users have been infected by this new wave of fake antivirus programs.
“Some 3% of these users have provided their personal details in the process of buying a product that claims to disinfect their computers,” said Dominic Hoskins, Country Manager, Panda Security UK.
“In fact, they never even receive the product. Extrapolating from an average European price of €49.95, we can calculate that the creators of these programs are receiving more than €10 mln per month”.
All of this is achieved simply by creating thousands of variants of a new type of adware and distributing it across the Internet. Users can be infected in several ways: browsing web pages with adult content; downloading files from peer-to-peer networks; responding to e-greetings; downloading files that exploit security holes so users are infected without realizing, etc. There have even been cases of the Google home page being manipulated.
These programs all operate in a broadly similar way: The program tells users that they are infected and pop-up windows, desktops and screensavers keep appearing, practically preventing the victim from using the computer. The aim is to scare the user into buying the fake anti-virus with, for example, cockroaches ‘eating’ the desktop, or fake blue screens of death.