Rogue security products are the new black

Well, it looks like rogues are going to be in style this season.Our good friends at McAfee AV have predicted that the 400 percent increase in rogues (also called “scareware”) they saw in 2009 will continue this year. The loss to victims will be on the order of $300 million they also estimated.Here at Sunbelt, we’re seeing a huge increase in rogue detections as well – nearly 30 percent increase in just the last three months. We list 1,965 rogues in our VIPRE detections and we’re detecting a constantly increasing number of them. VIPRE and CounterSpy installations report these detections to the Sunbelt ThreatNet. Just pulling some fast numbers out of ThreatNet, I found a 29 percent increase in VIPRE and CounterSpy detections when comparing the daily average for February against that of December.In the event you’ve been living in a cave (with no Internet service) for the last two years, rogues are thieving malicious programs that pretend to be legitimate anti-malcode products. They are real money makers for organized and disorganized criminals who work through the Internet.Sadly, security people have been working for most of 20 years to raise the public consciousness about malicious code and the need to run anti-malcode protection. About the time the message really began to sink in, the slimeballs (continue reading...)