The settlement must still be approved by a court

The Federal Trade Commission has suspended the majority of a judgment levied against two defendants accused of selling bogus security software to up to 1 million consumers.

James Reno and his Web hosting company, ByteHosting Internet Service of Ohio, now have to forfeit $116,697, just a fraction of the $1.9 million the judgment had originally required Reno and the company to pay. The settlement must still be approved by a court, the FTC said.

The rest of the penalty was suspended because the defendants wouldn't be able to pay it all, the agency said. However, if it is found that Reno and the company misrepresented their assets, they will have to pay the full amount.

More than $100,000 in assets were frozen after a federal court issued a temporary restraining order in December following the FTC complaint. Among other conditions, the court ordered six people and two companies to stop advertising so-called "scareware" security programs under the names WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner, ErrorSafe and XP Antivirus.

The applications are sold via deceptive pop-up ads that falsely alert people that their PCs have security problems, badgering them with warnings until they buy the software, which can cost around $40.

The FTC complaint asked hosting providers to prevent people from accessing the Web sites that host the programs. The FTC asked the court to force the defendants to forfeit money from the scam and compensate consumers.

Posted by Nancy Pursley in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:44

Minutes after any big celebrity dies, Internet swindlers get to work. They pump out specially created spam e-mails and throw up malicious Web sites to infect victims' computers, hoping to capitalize on the sudden high demand for information.

Michael Jackson's death was no different, and security experts say the fraud artists are just getting started.

The scams started cropping up almost instantaneously as Jackson's death was still hitting the news. As days have gone by, they've gotten more sophisticated — and dangerous.

Jackson's death "took a lot of people by surprise — the spammers, too," said Dermot Harnett, principal analyst for anti-spam engineering at Symantec Corp., a security software maker. "It might take them some time to really pounce on this issue. They are catching up pretty quickly, though."

Any major world event, such as the recent protests in Iran, triggers a barrage of Internet attacks. Security experts say the malicious traffic associated with Jackson's death will likely match and perhaps exceed those of other big spamming campaigns, such as those connected with the swine flu outbreak and Saddam Hussein's execution.

Spam is the most common way for fraudsters to find victims after these types of events. They can use a shotgun approach with a boilerplate message about Jackson, taking advantage of people's interests in the topic to improve their batting average over their usual spam campaigns.

By enticing users with such messages and tricking them into clicking on e-mail attachments, scammers can easily infect victims' computers and take command of them for more nefarious activities.

The spam about Jackson's death gets more convincing every day.

One message promises a YouTube video showing the exclusive "last work of Michael Jackson." Instead, victims get a malicious program that steals their passwords. Another promises to show the "latest unpublished photos" of Jackson if you click on a link — one that also tries to install a password-stealing program on your machine.

Others purport to be from legitimate news outlets and may contain accurate enough information to convince viewers they're real enough to click on. Others promise access to secret songs.

The effects of specific spam campaigns, like the one surrounding Jackson's death, are hard to quantify, though. Spam levels are already so high that there might not be a noticeable increase in overall spam levels, Harnett said. By some estimates spam accounts for more than 90 percent of all e-mail sent around the world, though the bulk of the messages get filtered out before ever reaching the user.

Celebrity deaths are a gold mine for criminals because lots of people go online looking for news. Google Inc. says the spike in searches for news stories about Jackson's death was so sharp the company initially mistook it for an automated attack.

Many of the information-seekers can be tricked, via e-mail, into visiting malicious Web sites. That opens the door to all kinds of nastiness, like spying on what someone's typing or using the hijacked machine to send spam.

There are also so many more Web sites about celebrities after their deaths that it's hard to figure out which ones are legitimate fan sites, and which ones were created by criminals.

Posted by Nancy Pursley in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:10

By John Leyden

US consumer watchdogs at the Federal Trade Commission have agreed to settle a lawsuit against rogue security software distributors on reduced terms.

James Reno and ByteHosting Internet Services were found responsible for distributing scareware products that used underhanded methods. The scam foisted software of no utility on the basis it was necessary to fix supposed security problems or remove smut from the PCs of prospective marks. The defendants - found responsible for tricking more than a million punters into buying rogue products including WinAntivirus, ErrorSafe, and XP Antivirus - were ordered to pay $1.9m last year.

Posted by Kyle Reiners at 17:08

If you happen to see a too-good-to-be-true offer to watch the latest Harry Potter movie online for free, watch out.

According to anti-malware software maker PC Tools, opportunistic crooks are using poisoned blog comments and dirty search engine optimization tricks to highlight lures such as 'Watch "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" online free. Clicking a link would take you to a post that would then attempt to fool victims into downloading and installing a "streamviewer" to see the movie, which is of course actually malware. Online crooks have used fake video codecs and viewers for years as a favorite social engineering tactic.

While you're at it, keep an eye out for malware-spreading e-mail that attempts to foist the "Zbot" Trojan onto victim PCs. The bad guys are using a variety of e-mails, including some that warn of a supposed critical update for Microsoft Outlook, or declare that you've received an eCard. TRACElabs has a number of screen shots of the fake e-mails in their post. Some e-mails link to a malicious download, while others link to it directly.

There are tell-tales in the e-mails for an astute surfer, but they're hidden behind a layer or two of obfuscation. For example, the displayed link to the fake Outlook update shows as http://update.microsoft.com/...., and checking the actual URL by moving your mouse over the link might initially look legit as well, until you notice that the real URL is http://update.microsoft.com.[fakedomain].com...

Such links are another favorite bad-guy tactic. To guard against all this evil social engineering, your best bet by far is to always send downloads and attachments to Virustotal.com (the site the pros use) for a free multi-engine malware scan before running them on your PC.

Our Comment: It seems we have to be wary of everything now and check all of it out.

Original Article

Posted by Nancy Pursley in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:54