September 3rd, 2009
Scareware goes Green
Malicious pseudo-environmentalists have come up with a new social engineering tactic aiming to improve the profit margins of their fake antivirus software releases - by promising to donate $2 from every purchase for saving the Amazonian green forests.
The new scareware template branded as “Green-AV Premier Edition 3.0” is pitched as the “World’s First Antivirus Which Cares About the Environment” and goes for a hefty price of $99.99, in comparison to other scareware brands whose price tags vary from $49 to $79.
Green-AV’s mission statement reads:
“Fighting viruses, spyware, malware is not only a question of security. Spyware actualy abuses your computer, overuses CPU speed, network bandwidth, makes your PC run slow. As a result you start consuming more power, working longer, think of replacing your PC with a new one which brings more unrecyclable wastes (many computer’s parts contain toxic wastes).
This way Green AV actualy cares about the environment. We thought that our application can guard not only your PC, but whole Earth - our home planet. So to show how much we care we desided to send $2 from each product sale on saving green forests in Amazonia.”
Despite the social engineering efforts on behalf of Green-AV’s authors, the Secure SLL Connection padlock image indicates the bogus nature of their antivirus protection claims. They actually meant SSL connection.
Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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