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.

How malware authors evade antivirus detection

January 18, 2012 – 6:37 pm

By Dancho Danchev Aiming to ensure that their malware doesn’t end up in the hands of vendors and researchers, cybercriminals are actively experimenting with different quality assurance processes whose objective is to increase the probability of their campaigns successfully propagating in the wild without detection. Some of these techniques include multiple offline antivirus scanning interfaces [...]

By ddanchev | Also posted in Backdoors, Dialers, Downloaders, Keyloggers, malware, Phishing Trojans, Ransomware, rootkit, Trojans, Uncategorized | Comments (8)

Criminals Abuse Amazon Hosting with Rogues, Ransomware

July 20, 2011 – 11:21 am

By Andrew Brandt The criminals who push rogues at the world don’t really care about the reputations of the ISPs or Web hosting services they abuse. They leap from free service to free service until they’ve thoroughly worn out their welcome and, in some cases, destroyed the reputation of the service they abused. But they [...]

By mguthrie09 | Also posted in Advanced Malware Removal, Botnet activity, Ransomware, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (2)

Fake UPS Document Installs Fake Microsoft Patch Payload

June 17, 2011 – 8:12 am

By Andrew Brandt As if we didn’t have enough to deal with this week — after a Microsoft patch Tuesday that brought with it a boatload of security updates for Windows, Office, Silverlight, Visual Studio, and other programs — some enterprising malware distributor is emailing around bogus tracking number malware dressed up in the icon [...]

By mguthrie09 | Also posted in Backdoors, Botnet activity, Downloaders, hijack search results, Keyloggers, social engineering, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (1)

MacProtector: Rogue of the Week

May 27, 2011 – 6:00 pm

By Andrew Brandt This week, we turn our attention temporarily away from the never-ending stream of rogue security products on the Windows platform and take a closer look at the Mac OS analogue, MacProtector (aka Mac Security, Mac Defender, MacGuard, and–if history serves–soon to be many, many other names). There’s been a lot of press [...]

By mguthrie09 | Also posted in Advanced Malware Removal, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Leave a Comment

Rogue of the Week: Windows Recovery

May 19, 2011 – 10:56 pm

By Andrew Brandt Word from the AMR group last week was that there weren’t many changes from the previous week; Many of the same rogue antivirus previously reported in this blog continue to plague the Internet. This week I decided to focus on a rogue that’s recently become a problem. It goes by the name [...]

By mguthrie09 | Also posted in Advanced Malware Removal, Internet Explorer, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (7)

Antivirus Center: Rogue of the Week

May 10, 2011 – 2:59 pm

By Andrew Brandt and Brenden Vaughan Our Advanced Malware Removal group reported seeing several cases of a rogue called Antivirus Center this past week. The rogue isn’t new – we began seeing samples of it last year – but has re-emerged as a threat. This rogue is characterized by a close mimicry of some aspects [...]

By mguthrie09 | Also posted in Advanced Malware Removal, social engineering, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (5)

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 mguthrie09 | 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 mguthrie09 | Also posted in Blackhat SEO, Destructive behavior, social engineering, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Trojans | Comments (9)
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