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What is scareware
Scareware is a social engineering technique that seeks to scare the victim into believing that they have a virus on their device and that they must purchase or download specific software. Like many social list of bahrain whatsapp phone numbers engineering techniques, it relies on human emotions and is used to scare a person into downloading malware.
What is scareware?
If you’ve ever seen a pop-up on your screen with a message like “Virus Alert Warning!” or “Alert! 5 Viruses Detected!”, that’s scareware. The idea of scareware is to convince the user, through fear, that their device is infected with a virus (or several) and that they should take immediate action and download or purchase the malicious software.
Scareware, which is a combination of the words “scare” and “software,” takes advantage of human reactions and emotions.
However, unlike baiting , which promises to reward the user, scareware seeks to create anxiety and fear in order to manipulate the user. But unlike smishing , which uses SMS, scareware works across multiple devices and on both desktop and mobile devices.
Examples of scareware
In 2009, Mac users began receiving scareware to purchase or download fake antivirus software, such as Mac Security and MacDefender. This scam was later determined to be related to the Russian payment system ChronoPay .
In 2010, a Best Western ad was used to redirect visitors to the Minneapolis Tribune website to fraudulent websites, which infected their devices with malware.
A scareware campaign that ran from 2009 to 2016 targeted OfficeMax and Office Depot customers , convincing them to purchase a recommended repair service after a fake PC scan “warned” them that their devices were infected with a virus. As a result, Office Depot was forced to pay $35 million to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for deliberately misleading its customers.
