McAfee: A million 'scareware' victims a day

If you've ever seen a message pop up on your computer telling you that your machine has a virus and offering to fix it for a fee, be careful. You might be a victim of "scareware."

If so you will be in good company. Security firm McAfee that says that worldwide a million people are victimized by scareware daily. There are 69,000 daily cases in the United States, according to the company.

McAfee Labs reports that "scareware has increased more than 600 percent in the last two years." The company says that criminals make "upwards of $300 million worldwide" from scareware scams. Scareware typically appears as if it's a legitimate security product that informs a user of an infection. Users are invited to pay for, download, and install the software. Not only do these scams take your money but they jeopardize the security of your credit card and your computer. If the scareware contains malicious software it can plant a keylogger or a password-stealing Trojan on your machine to steal personal information, or it could infect your system with other types of malware, including software that spreads these bogus messages to others.

In an interview (scroll down for podcast), McAfee's director of security research, Dave Marcus, said such programs are "actually worse than useless...It doesn't find what it says it finds and certainly doesn't clean what it doesn't find, the only thing it exists for is scaring you into making this purchase."