Scammers who try to trick victims into downloading fake Antivirus Software can strike almost anywhere. On Sunday they hit the website of Kaspersky Lab, a well-known antivirus vendor.
Someone took advantage of a bug in a Web program used by the Kasperskyusa.com website and reprogrammed it to try and trick visitors into downloading a fake product. Kaspersky didn't identify the flaw, but said it was in a "third-party application" used by the website.
As a result of the attack, users trying to download Kaspersky's Lab consumer products were redirected to a malicious website". The website caused a pop-up window to appear that simulated a virus scan of the user's PC, and offered to install an antivirus program that was in fact bogus.
This is a typical trick for fake-antivirus scammers, who are constantly looking for new ways to trick victims into buying their products. In the past they've been known to pose as legitimate online advertisers and then suddenly switch their ad inventory from legitimate-looking ads to these fake pop-up messages.
Security experts say the safest thing to do when one of these fake antivirus messages pops up is to simply kill the Web browser. On Windows, this can be done by hitting ctrl-alt-delete and ending the browser process in the Task Manager.
Someone took advantage of a bug in a Web program used by the Kasperskyusa.com website and reprogrammed it to try and trick visitors into downloading a fake product. Kaspersky didn't identify the flaw, but said it was in a "third-party application" used by the website.
As a result of the attack, users trying to download Kaspersky's Lab consumer products were redirected to a malicious website". The website caused a pop-up window to appear that simulated a virus scan of the user's PC, and offered to install an antivirus program that was in fact bogus.
This is a typical trick for fake-antivirus scammers, who are constantly looking for new ways to trick victims into buying their products. In the past they've been known to pose as legitimate online advertisers and then suddenly switch their ad inventory from legitimate-looking ads to these fake pop-up messages.
Security experts say the safest thing to do when one of these fake antivirus messages pops up is to simply kill the Web browser. On Windows, this can be done by hitting ctrl-alt-delete and ending the browser process in the Task Manager.
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