Court orders 'scareware' shut down

Baltimore Sun ^ | 13 Dec 2008 | Tricia Bishop

[Sgt_Schultze]

A Baltimore federal court judge ordered six absent defendants yesterday - including one from Maryland - to shut down Internet businesses that the Federal Trade Commission claims are part of a vast $100 million "scareware" scheme that tricked more than a million people into purchasing useless security software by making them think their computers were under attack.

"The evidence in this case is quite overwhelming," said U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett.

He also extended a freeze on the defendants' assets and signed an order requiring them to show why they shouldn't be held in contempt of court for missing the hearing and ignoring an earlier restraining order.

Bennett promised he would issue arrest warrants within five days if this round of orders in the civil case is ignored.

"People are hiding out," he said. "The time for hiding out will be over as of 4 o'clock next Wednesday."

[Gondring]

Probably Libertarians.

You forgot the sarcasm tag.

[Riley]

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

I remove half a dozen occurrances of that a week. It's only difficult to kill if it comes with that stupid rootkit that knows the names of antimalware software and prevents them from being installed.

To All:

If you get this thing, go to www.malwarebytes.org

and download MalwareBytes. Install, UPDATE and run a full scan. Remove whatever it finds. If you can't run the download, you have the afore-mentioned stupid rootkit. Rename the mbam-setup.exe file to anything else, such as mb.exe. Retain the .exe extension, of course. Scan, kill whatever it flags as badware.

Infectionx2009 is gone.

[Still Thinking]

Asshats.

[Still Thinking]

What a cash cow; create and distribute malware then cure it for a price!

You know, I always wondered if the anti-virus people were maybe funding the virus people.

[Still Thinking]

And overindulgence in crack is apparently a Pubbie thing.

[stylin_geek]

One of the things I’ve done is go into “services” in Windows and disable those programs from ever starting up. Sometimes, trying to dig those programs out takes more time than I care to spend at that time.