Court orders 'scareware' shut down

Baltimore Sun ^ | 13 Dec 2008 | Tricia Bishop

[Sgt_Schultze]

This industry is one deserving extinction.

[KoRn]

/mark

[cripplecreek]

No kidding. I fell for one back in my new to the net days.

[mkjessup]

This industry is one deserving extinction

Absolutely correct. And the damn perps ought to be looking at some hard time (7 to 10 years minimum) learning how to use an abacus instead of a PC. The writers, distributors and sellers of 'scareware' are so low on the food chain they even make bottom feeders look like discriminating partakers of the finest cuisine.

[LiberConservative]

Good. Too many newbs fall for stuff like this.

[CottShop]

Great- now the scareware makers are goign to go for a bailout from congress

[Moonman62]

Probably Libertarians.

[relictele]

Forget the industry - hang the offenders.

[JimRed]

What a cash cow; create and distribute malware then cure it for a price! I had a repeated notice disguised as an internet explorer warning that I had an infection; but my daily scans on my anti-virus software showed none.

An update from IE cured it.

[yorkie]

Somehow, these nasty scammers got into my computer, too. Every two minutes a box would come up, warning of 32 “critical threats” to my computer. To remove them, you had a choice. Type in your email address or use pay-pal. That is when I called my ‘Geek Boy’. He said this bug is keeping him running from dawn to dusk, to remove the virus from his client’s computers.

And, guess what? It said it was a warning from “Windows”.

[miliantnutcase]

xp anti-virus 2009? very common malware that I have seen spread like an epidemic as of late. Extremely difficult to remove also.

[Tigercap]

I’m not proud to say that I allowed anti-virus 2009 into my computer (I didn’t pay for the “protection” but) allowed it to “scan” my computer.

I then got suspicious and read about it. I was able to remove it after following some instructions on a geek website.

#*%!

[yorkie]

Yes - that was the one, I’m fairly sure! It only took my computer tech about fifteen minutes to remove. He told me he is spending his entire day removing this thing. I asked him how I could have gotten it and he didn’t know. He just knew that almost all of his several hundred clients had been infected.

[Ellendra]

I got warnings like this a few days ago. Norton couldn’t find anything, updates didn’t help. Eventually I gleaned enough from the geek forums discussing it that I was able to remove it manually. That involved finding the file (it was named “Google” and was a hidden folder), renaming it so it wouldn’t keep running automatically (you can’t delete a file that’s in use), rebooting with the network cable unplugged (otherwise it would try to run still, throwing out error messages saying “File not found”, which was apparently enough to be considered still “in use”) and then finally I was able to delete the whole Google folder.

As a non-techie, I was proud of myself.

[Ellendra]

Ping!

[fremont_steve]

Running Linux does make me immune to much of this crap. Running browsers OTHER than IE will help. Running other than Outlook will help.

If one of them DOES pop up due to browsing to a page under Linux I know it’s false just because I have no scanner running (I know what the OS is doing.. open source don’t ya know..)

It’s called peace of mind. ;-)

[ShadowAce]

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

Probably Libertarians.

No.

Scaremongering is more of a Republican thing.

[Moonman62]

Being selfish and taking advantage of the weak is a Libertarian thing.

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

Being selfish and taking advantage of the weak is a Libertarian thing.

Don't keep up on things much do you?

Ever heard of the Bail outs?

Another Republican thing.

Of course spreading lies about Libertarians is also a Republican thing.