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Spooky Season — A Reminder that Scareware is Just That
When I got back from my morning grocery store run today I went through my email.
Amongst my email was something from my website’s contact form (which is not as well protected from bots as my actual email) with the rather scary title “You’ve Been Hacked!”
Rolling my eyes, I clicked on it to discover that it appears to be an all new scam in the growing area of scareware.
What is Scareware?
Scareware is a specific form of malware. It uses social engineering to scare the user into taking an action.
The most common form of scareware is those website popups that used to be more common, which tell you your computer has been infected. To fix it, all you have to do is download their software.
The goal is either to get you to buy the software or to get a trojan onto your system. They may also be after your credit card number.
But there’s also a newer kind of scareware, which seems to be becoming more and more common. The one Igot this morning appears to be new to the wild (and has been properly reported).
This scareware leverages the growing popularity of ransomware. Instead of actually encrypting or stealing your files, which would be work, the scammer attempts to…