After quite a few months of trying to raise public awareness of the problem of fake support cold-calling both here [and elsewhere, it's good to see other vendors also starting to publicize the issue. I've previously cited an article by Symantec's Orla Cox that describes one exchange of civilities with one of the scammers, and
The problem with preventing such scams is that social engineering is very lo-tech in nature, requiring little in the way of technical resources and investment. Scammers are relying on the victims naivety, to grant them access to their computer and credit card details, so there’s very little a security company can do to prevent them,
The individual concerned had received a phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, and informing him that notification had been received concerning a virus infection on his PC, and offering to help him to install antivirus software. When asked what antivirus software was being offered, the caller claimed that it was ESET’s.
ESET is not going to try to capitalize on McAfee's unfortunate false positive problem (and nor, I'm sure, is any other reputable vendor). Such problems can arise for any AV vendor: it's an inevitable risk when you're trying to walk the line between the best possible detection of threats and avoidance of false detections (someone please
Here in the UK we’ve seen quite a lot of media attention (TV movies and documentaries and so on) relating to the 9/11 attacks, so I’m sure there’s a lot more happening in the US, today of all days. Sky News (http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/September-11-Terror-Attacks-New-Video-Of-Plane-Crashing-Into-South-Tower-9-11-Memorial-And-Museum/Article/200909215379149) has published an article that includes a link to a video clip of the
CNET, who hosts Download.com, has enjoyed a reputation for being a safe place to download software from. The program you download may be great or may be useless, but it had been “Tested Spyware Free.” At least that is what Download.com says about their downloads. Today it has come to my attention that the site