• BBC News, Wednesday, October 1, 2008 11:30 AM

Software giant and Washington State's attorney general are taking on a small but growing online nuisance: "scareware" merchants. Purveyors of scareware try to frighten computer users into buying unnecessary software with pop-up messages that warn of false virus infections or other hardware damage than can only be solved by downloading their programs.

Attorney General Rob McKenna called the tactic "a blatant rip-off of consumers." Users are "duped into downloading a fake scan (of the computer) and then duped into paying for software they don't need," he said, adding that past prosecutions prove that shady online merchants are well within the prosecutorial reach of state and local governments.

The problem has been getting worse in the past six months, according to Eric Sites, the chief technology officer with security firm Sunbelt Software. And what is Microsoft's interest? Scareware is largely made possible by a feature in Windows that allows computer network administrators to send notices to computer users.

Read the whole story at BBC News »