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Malware Writers Develop Scareware Imitating Blue Screen of Death

As per the report released by the security company Sunbelt Software in the first week of August 2009, malware purveyors are catching the attention of of computer users by playing with the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) to install fake security applications most popularly known as scareware.

Explaining the attack, security experts have said that BSOD displays an NT system if something were gone wrong in the user's system. Blue screen is actually a screen saver that authentically imitates a BSOD along with the stimulation of startup screen come when the system undergoes for rebooting.

In the present scareware scam, probable marks are seen with a crashed system. These marks come with a warning text that states victim should buy a security software called 'SystemSecurity' to remove all malicious codes.

Security researchers at Sunbelt state that 'SystemSecurity' is a bogus antispyware program designed to trick innocent users to handover their hard earned money to scammers.

Security experts have said that in most of the cases besides presenting a fake warning of security risks, scareware program don't perform anything malicious. 'SystemSecurity' is a good example of such type scareware.

'SystemSecurity' generally enters a system through fake video codec installation. After it has installed in the system, SystemSecurity starts displaying an annoying pop-up with fake information regarding infection and critical system risks. These fake security pop up and warnings are objectively designed to make people believe that their system have been infected with sophisticated viruses. malware purveyors present SecuritySystem as an effective solution to clean up the system.

While different versions of 'SystemSecurity' have been circulating on the Internet since February 2009, the BSOD technique is a new social engineering innovation which has been spotted in some attacks.

Moreover, 'SystemSecurity' is designed by the same people who created 'Winweb Security', another rogue antispyware that has victimized a large number of people.

In fact, security experts at PandaLabs discovered that fraudsters were making large sum of money by using scareware.

Related article: Malware Authors Turn More Insidious

» SPAMfighter News - 8/28/2009

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