Statistics and Probability Commons^™

The Underground Economy Of Fake Antivirus Software, Douglas Steigerwald, Brett Stone-Gross, Ryan Abman, Richard Kemmerer, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna

Douglas G. Steigerwald

Fake antivirus (AV) programs have been utilized to defraud millions of computer users into paying as much as one hundred dollars for a phony software license. As a result, fake AV software has evolved into one of the most lucrative criminal operations on the Internet. In this paper, we examine the operations of three large-scale fake AV businesses, lasting from three months to more than two years. More precisely, we present the results of our analysis on a trove of data obtained from several backend servers that the cybercriminals used to drive their scam operations. Our investigations reveal that these …