Microsoft files suit against Antivirus 2009
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According to Brian Krebs, Security Fix blogger for The Washington Post, the State of Washington, assisted by Microsoft Corp., has filed a “John Doe” lawsuit against the distributor of the Antivirus 2009 malware, which I wrote about earlier.
A “John Doe” lawsuit is a law suit that is filed against a party that you don’t yet have an identify for. Once the law suit is filed for, subpoenas are used to gain the identify of the other party. Any law suit against a web site owner that is trying to hide behind false or missing contact information will typically start out like this.
The law suits were filed under Washington State’s Computer Spyware Statute. The Computer Spyware Statute passed into law in 2005, and among other things, the law makes it illegal to falsely entice someone to download software by claming it is necessary for security or privacy. The statute allows for penalties up to $100,000 per violation. The first law suit under this act was filed in January of 2006 by the state’s attorney general, which also received assistance from Microsoft.
This is good news. I was wondering how long these criminals would be allowed to run rampant, maintaining a rather stable web presence for many months now.
November 20th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I was just ripped off by Antivirus 2009 two days ago and did not realize this until now. It happened so fast and I was not able to research anything before purchasing the fraud application. I happened upon the fraud info today and have uninstalled the virus software using the correct methods…Now I need to be sure my credit card info is not going to be used over and over.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Contact all of those scammers. Its very easy to find though. The amount of money you can get from suing those bad guys, may be incredible.
If anyone is willing to create an anti-webscam business, camp me in. I don’t have much experience, but I do not think innocent people should be hurt.
January 4th, 2009 at 4:13 am
Antivirus 2009 took over our computer not too long ago and it took hours to get rid of! Save yourself the time and you can use a free program called “Malwarebytes” or something like that. Do a quick scan, delete all the quarantined files and repeat 2-3 times. You will also need to restart your computer in between each time.
I hope the scammers get caught and thrown in jail!