Windows 7: Rogue Antivirus Gangs Seize on McAfee Snafu.

Purveyors of rogue anti-virus, a.k.a. “scareware,” often seize upon hot trending topics in their daily efforts to beef up the search engine rankings of their booby-trapped landing pages. So it’s perhaps no surprise that these scammers are capitalizing on search terms surrounding McAfee, which just yesterday shipped a faulty anti-virus update that caused serious problems for a large number of customers.


Searching for McAfee’s free scanning tool along with the name of yesterday’s bad update returns page after page of results that when visited launch the familiar come-ons that try to frighten visitors into purchasing bogus (if not also malicious) anti-virus products. I took the screen shots here with Internet Explorer 8, because as usual the booby-trapped pages simply would not load with the noscript add-on enabled in my version of Firefox.

Update 11:08 a.m. ET: Panda Security just published a similar post which lists a number of McAfee-related search terms that can lead to sites like those in the screen shots below.