Wall Street Journal, False Security: ‘Scareware’ Spreads 0
While surfing the Web in December, Keren Brophy got a message on her computer screen telling her to update her antivirus software. The pop-up message looked similar to Windows security warnings she’d routinely received. She paid $49.99 for a program called Antivirus 2009 from a company calling itself Meyrocorp and thought she was safe.
A few days after she installed the software, Ms. Brophy’s computer wouldn’t boot up properly and soon was unusable; she noticed the desktop icon for the software she’d bought had disappeared. She had to wipe her hard drive clean to get the computer working again. Hoping for a refund, she sent email to Meyrocorp but got only automated replies.
“I never got a dime back from them,” says Ms. Brophy, a 37-year-old restaurant hostess from North Port, Fla. Meyrocorp couldn’t be located for comment.
What started out as a small-scale racket to defraud computer users is becoming big business. Rogue antivirus programs — also known as “scareware” — had a banner year in 2008. A recent report published by Microsoft Corp. found that scareware infections increased 48% in the second half of 2008 compared with the previous six months, hitting nearly 8 million. One program turned up on 4.4 million unique computers, a 66.6% increase over the first half of the year, according to the report.