Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Rogue Antivirus Gangs Seize on McAfee Snafu

Summary: Scareware distributors capitalized on search terms around McAfee after the company shipped a faulty antivirus update that caused serious problems for a large number of customers, with searches for McAfee's free scanning tool plus the bad update returning pages of booby-trapped results. Krebs captured the screenshots in Internet Explorer 8 because the pages would not load with the noscript add-on enabled in Firefox, and Panda Security published a similar post listing McAfee-related search terms that lead to such sites.

What's compelling: A vendor's bad update did not just break customer machines; it handed scammers a trending keyword to rank malicious landing pages against, turning the incident itself into the lure.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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