Join the 30 Million Other Idiots Who Have Eradicated Cockroaches From Their PCs

[mandy]

More than 30 million Internet users have fallen victim to fake antivirus programs that snatch up people's money and personal information, security research firm PandaLabs has announced. The phenomenon may not be a new one, but it's growing more and more popular as the scammers are getting more crafty. There are now over 7,000 variants of this type of adware, says PandaLabs, and the number of infections caused by it is increasing rapidly.

Users can get infected with this fake antivirus scam in the same manner as any other type of virus or malware—by downloading questionable content from P2P networks, opening e-mail attachments from unknown addresses, or visiting malicious web pages. As most of us already know (probably by servicing the computers of our parents and other less-tech-savvy family members), users are often duped by seeing the software pop up windows that claim the machine is infected, fake bluescreens, or cause other annoyances (PandaLabs notes one where cockroaches crawl all over the desktop)...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200...ctims.html