Football’s 2010 World Cup has proved to be a magnet for cybercriminals and security researchers have had to keep their eyes firmly on the ball in the constant battle to protect users.
According to Symantec’s Orla Cox, the company’s researchers encounter hundreds of scams and misleading applications looking to trick users into allowing the scammers access to their computers.
“Common techniques employed include repeated, often aggressive, warnings about serious computer problems such as malware infections and system errors. Typically these warnings are fake and are used to scare the user into parting with their money in order to correct the ‘problems’.
“Recently, however, we’ve uncovered a similar scam with a disturbing twist. A company, reassuringly named ‘Online PC Doctors’, has been phoning users directly and informing them their PCs have been infected.”
Once contact has been made and users sufficiently alarmed, the scammers offer to remotely connect to their PCs and clean up the infection. All for a fee of course.
The scam is backed by a convincing website and the callers appear to be well trained and helpful but here’s the problem. For a “comprehensive” PC clean-up and subscription to a software maintenance service, the victims are charged a yearly fee of 129 euros and requested to e-mail the scammers their full names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card details and debit authorisation.
Says Cox: “On testing the scheme, we found that the clean-up merely involved clearing out the event viewer and turning off event logging so that users would no longer see any warnings in future!
“If you get a call from the ‘Online PC Doctors’, just hang up and advise your friends and family to do the same.”