Stormbringer's Thunder

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Buon giorno. No, my title is not talking about sneaky Basement Cat. Instead, I'm talking about a telephone call I received from an almost-victim. Fortunately, she made the right choices and did not get burned. She related her story to me so that I can sound yet another scam warning. And you know that I like exposing the scammers. This one reminds me of the XP Antivirus (and similar names) scams . That one gives you a fake pop-up, telling you that you have many viruses while it is scanning your computer. (The last time I saw this, they were using animated gif files to simulate scanning.) Often, the victim downloads the malware because they were tricked into it. In this case, the target receives a telephone call from someone claiming to represent Microsoft. The scammer (often reported to have an Indian accent) says that Microsoft has

Uncle Bob is angry today. The Internet should be a fun and safe place. What a crock! (Although what it says is true, this link has strong profanity.) Hal the Hacker was busy, so I had to help Teenie on my own. She got her fingers on the "XP Antivirus" software. It's vicious. And why was Teenie surprised by this, after all I've taught her? Well... "The new XP antivirus 2008 , that hit the World Wide Web computers in March, is a major update to its predecessor. By calling it "major update" I mean that XP anti virus became more violent, more resilient, more immune to removal attempts, more "intelligent"; now it's recovering itself after being removed via Add and Remove Programs option in Windows Control Panel...This year's XP antivirus is more colourful, too, and features same interface as many legitimate antispyware software tools. It's totally understandable why even senior computer users install this rogue antivirus blindly believ