New Spyware (Wrongly) Claims It's Won PCMag Award

By Larry Seltzer
7/22/2008 10:01:00 AM

This isn't news, but it's worth reminding everyone: there is a large category of malicious programs that present themselves as antispyware or antivirus programs. Having already established that they will lie about these things, they may lie about others. For instance, we recently came across one which claims to have won a number of awards, including the PC Magazine Editors' Choice.

I'm going to give an address here, not a live link. You don't want to visit this site unless you have all your operating system updates installed and genuine up-to-date antimalware running. The site itself appears to include malicious graphics: xpantispyware dot com. The ad looks like a fairly standard antimalware product ad. It also includes a number of award logos, including PCMag Editors' Choice and Best of 2005. For the record, it did not win any such awards.

This site and the fake program you can download from it are written up by Symantec as malicious. They make no claim that does anything malicious in the sense of infection or spreading itself. Instead they say that once you download and install it, it makes exaggerated claims of threats present on the computer. "The user is then prompted to pay for a full license of the application in order to remove the errors."

There used to be a good list to consult for this, the Spyware Warrior List of Rogue/Suspect Anti-Spyware Products & Web Sites but, alas, it has not been updated since May 4, 2007. The list's maintainers have gotten day jobs.

So how do you tell the fakes from the real thing? In this case it would suffice, once you had the name of a product, to search for it on Google or some other major engine. You would quickly notice lots of pages tagging it as malicious.

Originally posted on the PC Magazine security blog, Security Watch.