Another Day, Another Rogue Security Program

There is really no scarcity of spurious security programs. Almost daily, we see programs that pretend to be security programs but in reality are malicious. They display messages about system compromise and attempt to frighten users into purchasing some other malicious program to prevent the compromise. Or worse. While displaying fake messages about system compromise is bad, it’s almost benign when you consider that a rogue antispyware could itself be spyware.

Last week we stumbled upon FakeAlert-AntiSpywarePro. This is a rogue antispyware program. If you’re unlucky enough to run this application, you’ll see a window such as this:

You can run several kinds of system scans with this program. But to what avail? You can’t trust a program that lies to you. FakeAlert-AntiSpywarePro drops a number of files and installs a bunch of registry keys, including a key for a browser-helper object (BHO) for Internet Explorer.

So keep your AV signatures up to date, and say no to FUD seeded by unscrupulous malware authors!