How do I avoid getting a virus? Part II (Rogue Anti-Virus)
Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:14AM | Alfred Huger This is the second part of a multi part article on how to avoid getting a computer virus. This installment focuses on Rogue Anti-Virus/Security software.
Setting the stage
I think at this stage it’s common knowledge that virus writers/cyber criminals have one over arching goal – to separate you from your hard earned money by way of malicious or misleading software. The day of the ‘digital joy rider’ virus writers is by and large gone. People writing malware for fame and notoriety has taken a firm back seat position to pure greed. To achieve this goal they need to get their software onto as many unsuspecting computers as possible. Delivery of their malware in many cases is done as email attachments, infected websites, infected pirated software etc. However, the malware authors have a problem and the problem is that malware authors in general have been hugely successful in the past several years with these methods and people are getting wise to them. Malware authors are now faced with an increasingly better educated public who are more skeptical of the usual delivery methods that have done so well in the past. So what have they done to get around this?
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
Well the answer for a very successful group of cyber criminals has been to take advantage of the heightened awareness of virus proliferation by now dressing their malware up as security products. They have been so successful at marketing and distributing this ‘scareware’ or ‘Rogue AV’ (as some people call it) that the FBI recently released a warning stating the problem was so widespread it had, to their knowledge, at least taken $150,000,00 USD from unsuspecting consumers. To put that into perspective that is more money than many legitimate brand-name anti-virus vendors make annually!
This problem is wide spread because it is very, very difficult for anti-virus vendors and security companies to combat it. This software often looks legitimate; in some cases it even does rudimentary anti-virus scanning. The user interfaces on these packages are usually very slick and in my opinion some of them look better than legitimate anti-virus software packages. Yet no matter how nice they look they still end up defrauding people. Usually they do this quite obviously by downloading full-blown malware and stealing personal information (banking data etc) but some of the more subtle and insidious packages take your money for purchasing an empty ineffectual product and leave it at that.
The security companies you rely on are left with the dubious task of defining now what is good and bad software on a much more nuanced level. As you might guess from the numbers the FBI is posting, that despite their efforts security vendors could use some help here. As with many things this issue looks ugly but in most cases it is easy enough to avoid. Here are some basic steps to avoid getting this malware on your computers.
Don’t call me I’ll call you
Nearly all Rouge Anti-Virus software attempts to con you into installing through scare tactics or misleading pop up ads. These pop ads in many cases load what looks like an actual user interface on your computer and will often drop your actual browser out of sight. Some will actually tell you that you have viruses and will prompt you download their software to remove them. These ads look highly professional and are NOT easy to pick out as obviously fraudulent. They key here is to note that unless you are looking for anti-virus software be exceptionally wary of any ads that aggressively start popping up on your desktop. You need to be highly leery of Anti-Virus ads that pop out of nowhere, period.
A little reputation goes a long way
The singular most powerful and simple way to judge whether you should install any software is by its’ reputation. Any security package, which is genuine, will have a reasonable amount of footprint visible from search engines and social networking sites. We can use Immunet as an example. If you were to debate installing Immunet today you would be well served to see what the rest of the world has to say about it. So using today’s date as an example (December 17, 2009) I pick three of the most common sites I use and I check if Immunet has a presence on them and if it does, what are people saying? Let’s start with Google:
You can see here that a simple search for Immunet shows over 119,000 results for our name. You will see the first dozen or so results are reviews of our product, our company website, etc. If you take 5 minutes to review some of this content you quickly start to get a more comprehensive understanding of what the world has to say about our product.
Next we can take a look at Facebook. If I search for Immunet for Facebook I find that Immunet does indeed have it's own page (a good sign) and it has over 400 fans (also a good sign).
If we pull up the actual page we will now see that not only is there an active fan base (over 400 people) but there is also a good deal of activity from Immunet itself including content like videos, news postings etc.
Lastly, we take a look at Twitter to see what’s being said about Immunet from Twitter users.
Here we can see plenty of Twitter results as well with active users who also tweet about a broad variety of other topics.
As with anything, your opinion will be better informed the more time you spend reviewing different sources of information. I suspect not any single source above would be sufficient to feel totally confident about possibly suspect software. Yet all three should be enough to help make well informed decisions which will keep all but the most advanced rogue security software off your system.
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