- Saturday, 28 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
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Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement - Samuel Johnson
Washington and Microsoft target spammers
MICROSOFT AND WASHINGTON STATE have announced a new campaign against Internet scammers.
The two are suing a number of "scareware" vendors which will charged under Washington state's Computer Spyware Act.
The Washington attorney general (AG) referred to the defendants as " aggressive marketers of scareware – useless computer programs that bilk consumers by using pop-up ads to warn about nonexistent, yet urgent-sounding, computer flaws".
The Vole and AG have previously teamed up against alleged scammers. In 2005, the two successfully sued Secure Computer for $1 million over charges of deploying fake error messages to scare users into buying its Spyware Cleaner software.
The Attorney General has also brought lawsuits against Securelink Networks, High Falls Media and the makers of a product called Quick Shield.
According to Assistant AG Katherine Tassi, scammers were "getting more and more creative and putting more and more effort into making them look like [genuine] security messages". µ
L'Inq
IT World
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change a few words..

"aggressive marketers of scareware – useless intelligence that bilk the world by using media to warn about nonexistent, yet urgent-sounding, threats"

the US government?


"The Washington attorney general (AG) referred to the defendants as " aggressive marketers of scareware – useless computer programs that bilk consumers by using pop-up ads to warn about nonexistent, yet urgent-sounding, computer flaws"."

I get messages like those from M$'s OS every week: "StatusClient.exe - Bad Image : The application or DLL C:\WINDOWS\system32\HPBPRO.DLL is not a valid Windows image." Scared the beejeepers out of me and then the OS runs out of memory.

I guess the suit was based on making the message seem to come from the OS rather than the spammer, but, really, should not the whole world be warned about the implications for security of running that other OS? Cigarette packages come with warnings. I think M$ should be required to post pop-ups warning against using their OS about every five minutes.
Go get em, mighty Vole. No one is entitled to move in on YOUR scamming operation!

HB