Scammers Riding High On McAfee's FAIL

"Scammers have quickly piggybacked onto news of a buggy McAfee antivirus update that clobbered thousands of computers, security researchers said today.

"Early Wednesday, McAfee released a flawed signature update that wrongly tagged a crucial system file in Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) as malware. After the software quarantined the `svchost.exe` file, thousands of PCs, most of them in businesses, crashed and rebooted repeatedly.

"Firms are still dealing with the aftermath, with some companies forced to manually reconfigure hundreds or even thousands of systems.

"The debacle made news not just in the technical press, but in more mainstream outlets, including the New York Times and USA Today.

"And news is scammers' bread and butter. Using their now-traditional technique of poisoning results at majorsearch engines like Google and Bing, `scareware` makers have pushed links touting fake antivirus software to at or near the top of the results lists, said Graham Closely, senior technology consultant with Sophos.

"The links appear when users type search terms such as `McAfee update` and `McAfee 5958,` the latter a reference to the faulty update's designation, added Panda Security in a post to its company blog today..."

More at ComputerWorld...