I thought this article was worth sharing. It basically reveals who makes XP Antivirus 2008 and 2009, how much people are being paid and how these rogue antivirus applications are being distributed.
“If these stats are to be believed, one affiliate was able to install 154,825 copies of Antivirus XP 2008 in 10 days’ time and 2,772 of those copies were actually purchased by the victims,” Stewart wrote in his research. “This only represents a one-to-two percent conversion rate but with the generous commission structure, was enough to earn the affiliate $146,525.25 for that time period.”
I can tell ya that XP Antivirus 2009 is completely annoying and evades almost every antivirus application.
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Good info there mate. Such a plague those ones are.
Sure man. I know…they are everywhere now.
I hope some one sues them. Do they have a software that is designed to remove just this software? If they do, you should premote it.
I know how much you love Spyware Doctor and thought you might like to see the add-ons: http://www.pctools.com/spyware-doctor/addons/#behaviour_guard
With one of them you can integrate ThreatFire into Spyware Doctor with is pretty cool….
@James
I have Behavior Guard in my PC Tools Internet Security
Those Add-ons are for Spyware Doc…
The Internet Security “Suite” has everything (Site Guard, Email guard, Threat Fire etc) in it by default it seems
antivirus 2009 is an update to antivirus 2008. Both are russian generated rouge, malware type appliations. They can be a real pain to remove if you don’t know how. Many antivirus apps will not recognize them either. To remove just google “malwarebytes” antimalware. Install the free version, update and scan. It will find the instances and remove. It’s a great program and well worth the inexpensive license if you choose to get the paid version. Otherwise, the free version works great to remove most of the tougher malwares that are out there and will clean/keep the antivirus 2k8 and 2k9 off your system.