New Trend In Rogue Security Products

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Rogues now imitate utilities rather than anti-malcode apps
New trend in rogue security products

Since last week the rogue security products (also called scareware) that we’ve posted on the GFI-Sunbelt Rogue Blog
have had a new look. Instead of impersonating anti-virus products, these new ones are claiming to be applications that
fix disk errors on a victim’s machine: HDDDiagnostic, HDDRepair, HDDRescue and HDDPlus. They’re basically clones
and together they are members of a new family of rogues: FakeAV-Defrag.

Of course, they actually do nothing except throw up phony warnings and demand that the victim purchase them before
they “fix” the fictional problems they warn about.

Since rogues began to circulate seven or so years ago, they’ve always pretended to be anti-spyware or anti-virus products,
imitating the look of many legitimate anti-virus products and even the structure of their product names. In the last two
months, however, it has become clear that the rogue writers are trying something new to confuse potential victims.

Last month we started seeing “defragger” clones that claimed to be disk utilities: UltraDefragger, ScanDisk and WinHDD.
These pretended to find “HDD read/write errors.”

Defrag is a Windows utility that, at one time, substantially speeded up a PC’s performance by putting scattered portions of
files in continuous sections of a hard drive. Pieces of files were scattered because applications opened and added to them
over time and the operating system put them where there was space on the drive. The defrag utility “defragmented” the
entire disk, assembling the pieces of files into continuous sections so the operating system wasn’t slowed by the reassembly
process when accessing the files.

Defragmenting hasn’t been as much of an issue since PCs got faster, hard drives with much larger capacities became common
and newer versions of Windows (with better file handling capabilities) replaced older versions. However, many home PC users
have become aware of the defrag utility.

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