Scareware cybercriminals hit upon lucrative scam

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Cybercriminals who post fake websites that promote phony antivirus software have perfected the scam to a point where some are raking in as much as $10,000 daily from partners selling the bogus software, according to a web security report.

According to a report released Tuesday by web security researchers, cybercriminals have been using search engine optimization tools to drive increasing amounts of traffic to websites that redirect users to pages for buying antivirus software.

Researchers said they tracked cybercriminal activity through a malware server that led them to discover how the hackers were able to insert parasite pages on legitimate sites.

After search engines indexed the cybercriminals’ phony pages, they were displayed as top search results. The phony pages redirect anyone who clicked on them to a website selling rogue antivirus software.

Partners in the scam paid hackers 9.6 cents per redirection to the software-selling websites, researchers reported. Researchers observed 1.8 million unique user redirections in 16 consecutive days, according to the report.

Although less than 2 percent of redirected users paid $50 for the scam software, the software sellers paid $172,000, equal to $10,800 per day, to the cybercriminals who set up the fake pages.

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