Scareware and AntiVirus

Today the BBC has been carrying the story about “Millions” being taken in by scareware scams, where pop-up ads on web pages tell people they’ve got a virus and to download ‘this antivirus software’ to fix it.  At best the ‘antivirus software’ is useless, and the person’s credit-card number is sold for use in credit-card fraud. At worst, the “anti-virus” actually contains viruses (virii?) and trojans that make the computer less secure, rather than more.

Now of course there are lots of idots out there who will fall for this kind of thing. But to my mind, it’s not just those people’s faults – both PC Manufacturers and ISPs need to take some of the responsibility too.

It doesn’t take a lot to get decent anti-virus software. Go to Grisoft, and get the free AVG anti-virus software (free for personal use) and job done. There’s plenty of others too – Kaspersky, Avast, so on, so forth.

But people still have to know about these, rather than using the clusterfuck shitpieces like Norton, McAfee that come with most PCs and that people never use – or just assume that it’s installed, so Everything’s OK. Not knowing that they need to subscribe, and make sure it’s updated regularly (for which read daily, rather than monthly)

So why don’t the ISPs supply a free antivirus like AVG, Avast or Kaspersky on the CD you invariably get? Why don’t PC builders install a free anti-virus with the PC rather than the paid-for POS software? (Of course, we know that PC Builders like Dell etc. must get some whacking kickback fee for providing paid-for software, which is the reason)

If computers were provided with free anti-virus that didn’t require any further financial investment or effort from Joe Everyday-User, there’d be a lot less problems of this sort.