Okay, being a Mac person, I don’t understand this entirely. What company is responsible for this, and why can’t that company be held accountable? Are they overseas? Why can’t people put a stop pay on their blackmail payment to these thieves?
I deal with these all the time with my work and I call them “extortion ware”. The companies look like they are based out of Russia, and unlike traditional viruses, it is not about bragging rights, it’s about cold hard cash.
These programs are designed to look legitimate, even going so far as scanning your system to find out what anti-virus you are using and modifying the “warning screen” to match it. I’ve seen screens that look like it came from Microsoft, Norton, McAfee, AVG, Avast and Panda.
They make money because many people assume that it came from their company and they need this new program from that company to clean off the viruses.
When people run their anti-virus or anti-spyware program, these nasty little pieces of extortion-ware unleash their trojans and infect the system something fierce.
Malware-bytes and Spybot S&D have been lifesavers for me and my clients when they get hit hard.
An FYI to Mac users who care. One of the Russian groups has put out a bounty contest on anyone who can infect a large group of Macs with a trojan and get verified reports back from the machines. Every Mac who sends a report back earns the creator of the virus 40 cents. This sounds like someone is finally going to go after the growing Mac user base. So be careful what you click on out in cyberspace.