Cyber thieves have become distressingly good at exploiting current events to lure people into their traps. The latest scam involves the interest surrounding the finale of the TV series “Lost.” And perhaps not too surprisingly, the use an old mechanism for infecting the computer, a bogus antivirus program that doesn’t find malware, it is malware.
eSecurity Planet has the cautionary tale.
Fans of the hit ABC series “Lost” this week are stumbling onto a slew of bogus antivirus software scams that are using the much-anticipated series finale as a lure to rip people off and spread the very malware they falsely claim to subdue.
According to Panda Security, a flurry of socially engineered malware campaigns are using fake Web sites to distribute MySecurityEngine, a fake antivirus application that attempts to trick users into buying security software to remove nonexistent threats from their smartphones and PCs.