The FBI announced today federal indictments against those allegedly involved in the distribution of the WinFixer family of malware. WinFixer is a form of software often referred to as “rogue security software” or “scareware”. WinFixer is, essentially, software which fraudulently purports to provide a security benefit and in exchange solicits credit card information in order to charge the victim for a full version which will clean up infections which may not even be present. This family of malware displayed a number of different names in its attempts to social engineer its victims and appear legitimate. Some of the names associated with this family include Antivirus 2008, Antivirus 2009, WinSpywareProtect, Spyware Isolator, Advanced Cleaner, Antivirus XP and others.
The Microsoft Malware Protection Center provided supported for our Digital Crimes Unit in the investigation of WinFixer and would like to commend them as well as the Department of Justice and FBI for their actions in helping to protect our customers.
You can read more about this in the Microsoft On The Issues blog here.
–Jeff Williams
Principal Group Program Manager, MMPC
View full post on Microsoft Malware Protection Center
Related Posts
- DDoS hacker who left his wife for a fictitious online lover jailed for two years
For all its positive aspects, there are some pretty ugly things which happen on the internet too.
Take this extraordinary tale, for instance, of how two men falling out with each other, ignited into a... - Faciliate Digital have been caught distributing bad adverts again
NOTE: THE MISCREANTS ARE USING THE DOMAIN FACILITATEDIGITAL.NET – PLEASE DO NOT CONFUSE THEM WITH THE LEGITIMATE FACILITATEDIGITAL.COM, .US AND .EU This time the bad adverts hit dimetoo.co... - FBI, Justice Deparment investigating Nasdaq hacking attempts
Nasdaq OMX, the company that operates the Nasdaq stock exchange, has said that part of its online network has been penetrated by unknown hackers. Suspicious files were discovere... - Plentyoffish attacked by least anonymous hackers ever, user data compromised (Digital Trends)
Digital Trends - Online dating site Plentyoffish.com suffered a cyber-attack last week that compromised the usersâ passwords, usernames and email addresses, according to a blog post by Plentyoffish... - Stonesoft: Apple’s iOS will see malware in 2011 (Digital Trends)
Digital Trends - For years security firms have been predicting that Apple operating systemsâ run of luck avoiding almost all malware and spyware would be coming to an abrupt endâ¦and, although it ... - Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets
CSA DISCLAIMER: This video taken from YouTube. As well as any other video found on this site is not hosted here, it just embedded, and it taken randomly by our system from video hosting services lik... - California man supports himself by suing spammers (Digital Trends)
Digital Trends - After becoming fed up with the constant assault of spam his inbox was subjected to, Dan Balsam quit his job in the marketing field and went to law school to fight whoever was flooded... - Intel’s acquisition of McAfee approved by FTC (Digital Trends)
Digital Trends - Chipmaker Intel’s acquisition of security and antivirus software developer McAfee has been approved by the U.S. Federal Trade Commision, according to a notice posted on Intel’s Web s... - Avira: 25 pct of PC users disable antivirus software (Digital Trends)
Digital Trends - A new survey from German antivirus and computer security firm Avira finds that about one in four PC users admit to turning off virus protection on their PCs because they thought the ... - Zozzle (Microsoft’s Javascript-Malware Analysis Tool)
Zozzlein a sentence Zozzle is a static web-page analyzer for detecting ‘Heap-Spray Exploits’ [ literal meaning ] ‘a righteous observance of the law’ [ 3-Things It Is ] + a pro...
Posted on 29 May 2010. Tags: Congratulations, Crimes, Department, Digital, Justice, Microsoft’s, unit
