Com­puter viruses are a major prob­lem. If you have ever been hit with a com­puter virus you will know how frus­trat­ing it can be. Your whole sys­tem can become unwork­able. If you get one of those viruses that take over your desk­top and bom­bards you with pop up mes­sages say­ing you have a virus it can become impos­si­ble to do anything.

The prob­lem is this prob­lem is not going away but get­ting worse. Researchers at Google have released a report called The Nocebo Effect on the Web found a large increase in cases where users are tricked into pur­chas­ing fake antivirus soft­ware. This kind of mal­ware now accounts for 15% of all online mal­ware and 50% of mal­ware deliv­ered by adver­tis­ing, com­monly referred to as malver­tis­ing. This is a five time increase on last year.

In the report Google rec­om­mend use of virus and mal­ware detec­tion to pre­vent being attacked by this kind of virus. If your com­puter is not pro­tected read up on some antivirus reviews to ensure you get a soft­ware prod­uct that will pro­tect you.

The prob­lem with this fake antivirus soft­ware is often after pay­ing the fee to get rid of the incred­i­bly annoy­ing pop up mes­sages you are actu­ally installing addi­tional mal­ware onto your sys­tem which is used to mon­i­tor your web activ­ity and steal your per­sonal information.

Fake antivirus soft­ware scams have been around since 2003. Over the years this virus soft­ware has become more sophis­ti­cated using javascript to mimic the exact look and feel of the win­dows oper­at­ing system.

Fake antivirus soft­ware dis­trib­u­tors max­imise their reach by post­ing ads to sites which lead to fake antivirus dis­tri­b­u­tion sites and they also use black hat seo to opti­mise these dis­tri­b­u­tion sites for trend­ing keywords.

Fake antivirus soft­ware can be quite lucra­tive for cyber crim­i­nals and easy to set up. This is why the num­ber of domains detected by Google host­ing fake antivirus soft­ware went from 93 in Jan­u­ary 2009 to 587 in Jan­u­ary 2010.

To pro­tect your­self from fake antivirus soft­ware always make sure you have the lat­est antivirus soft­ware on your sys­tem and refrain from click­ing on adverts which appear sus­pi­cious. If you are prompted to down­load antivirus soft­ware you can always check the authen­tic­ity of the soft­ware by look­ing at antivirus reviews this way you will ensure you are not scammed.

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