Category Archives: Rogue Security Products

Software which attempts to convince a victim to pay for it through deceptive displays of information and technical trickery, most often by masquerading as antivirus or some other form of security software.

ROTW: “Total Security” and Antivirus IS

April 25, 2011 – 9:00 am

By Brenden Vaughan and Andrew Brandt This week, our support and advanced malware removal (AMR) team did not have a lot of new data to report about rogue security products. The most commonly encountered infection continues to be one of the rogues we reported about last week. While we may refer to it as XP [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Advanced Malware Removal, hijack search results, Internet Explorer, mal-effects, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (2)

Rogues of the Week: XP Total Security & MS Removal Tool

April 18, 2011 – 9:00 am

By Andrew Brandt It’s been said that sunlight sanitizes almost everything it shines on. Beginning this week, and every week from now on, we’ll focus a concentrated beam on the rogue antivirus programs our support staff and Threat Research team have been working to remediate. Rogues have a tendency to switch up their names, user [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Blackhat SEO, Destructive behavior, social engineering, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Trojans | Comments (10)

Korean Rogues’ Slapfight Bonanza

April 11, 2011 – 8:40 pm

By Andrew Brandt The other day, Threat Reseacher Dan Para sent along the video clip below, which gave us all a good laugh. Dan had been researching a Korean-language Trojan downloader, but when he ran the file, he didn’t expect the downloader to retrieve not one…not two…but three separate rogue antivirus products. The most amusing [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in adware, Downloaders, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (4)

Shipping Confirmations Back on the Radar

March 21, 2011 – 2:11 am

By Andrew Brandt After a prolonged absence, waves of Trojans distributed as Zipped email attachments have been showing up in our spam traps for a few weeks. The spam messages employ the same hackneyed shipping confirmation pretext as many previous iterations of this scam. This technique’s emergence as a common malware distribution method correlates with [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Backdoors, Botnet activity, Downloaders, Keyloggers, social engineering, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (3)

Google Results Tarnished Again to Push Rogues

January 15, 2011 – 3:48 am

By Andrew Brandt It’s been a few months since Google implemented new ways that it displays search results, and in that time, it’s been difficult to find the kinds of hijacked search results we saw in huge numbers a year ago. But if you thought the search engine manipulators were laying down on the job, [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in hijack search results, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Trojans, Website owners | Leave a Comment

New Year’s Drive-By Brings a Recursive Rogue

January 6, 2011 – 9:28 am

By Andrew Brandt On the morning of January 2nd, still bleary eyed, I checked my email to find a charming notification informing me that I’d received an electronic greeting card. Yay! I thought to myself: The first targeted malware of 2011 plopped right into my lap. I immediately pulled up my research machine, browsed to [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Backdoors, Downloaders, hijack search results, social engineering, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

10 Threats from 2010 We’d Prefer Remain History

January 1, 2011 – 3:32 pm

By Andrew Brandt With 2010 finally behind us, and an unknown number of cyberattacks likely to come in the new year, I thought I’d run down a brief list of the malicious campaigns criminals pulled off last year that I’d really dread to see anyone repeat. Now that they’re in the past, they should stay [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Backdoors, Blackhat SEO, Botnet activity, Destructive behavior, Enterprises, Firefox, Gaming threats, Internet Explorer, Keyloggers, Online shopping threats, Passwords, phishing, Phishing Trojans, social engineering, social networks, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Trojans, Website owners | Comments (1)

Karagany Isn’t a Doctor, but Plays One on Your PC

November 22, 2010 – 4:29 pm

By Andrew Brandt A Trojan that pulls a sly performance of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t disguises itself on an infected system as the Adobe Updater, a real program that’s installed alongside such mainstay applications as the Adobe Reader. This method of hiding in plain sight means the downloader, Trojan-Downloader-Karagany, may remain active on an infected system for an [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Botnet activity, Downloaders, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (6)

Rogue AV Spam Invades Multiply, Yahoo Mail

November 10, 2010 – 4:23 pm

By Andrew Brandt While nowhere near the size of the mammoth Facebook, the social network Multiply is no slouch. Based in Boca Raton, Florida, the site is designed around not only sharing photos and videos with friends and family, but also a relatively novel concept called social shopping, which permits users of the site to [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in social engineering, social networks, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Trojans | Comments (8)

Five Reasons You Should Always “Stop. Think. Connect.”

October 4, 2010 – 9:27 am

By Andrew Brandt Today’s the official kickoff for National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and the organizations supporting the event, including the National Cyber Security Alliance, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, and dozens of corporate citizens including Webroot, want you to protect your computer and your personal information. So they’ve come up with a three word campaign [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in adware, Blackhat SEO, Botnet activity, Destructive behavior, Firefox, Gaming threats, Internet Explorer, Keyloggers, malware, Online shopping threats, Passwords, phishing, Search engines, social engineering, social networks, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Trojans, Website owners | Comments (19)
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 609 other followers