A Black Friday Deal- Too Good to Be True

Office Depot had a deal on $10 webcams, the Markvision Magnetic Webcam, over the Thanksgiving Weekend. The camera came with a CD that contained a link to Markvision's website. However, when that link was clicked, it brought up a blank webpage and a popup saying the user needed to update their computer. When that pop up was closed, another window appeared which looked like a security anti-virus scan. It was veiled in such a way that to an inexperienced user, it could look like a legitimate anti-virus scan. In fact, clicking the link installed rougue anti-virus software on the users computer. "Rogue antivirus software typically generates pop-up warnings, telling the victim there's a security problem and pestering them to get it fixed until they hand over their credit card numbers." Still others install malicious keyloggers which can record all key strokes made on a computer, stealing usernames and passwords. Office Depot claimed that only a small number of customers were affected by this, and Markvision disabled their website until the problem could be fixed.

Initial reports indicate that the link was legitimate, but that Markvision's website had been hacked. Given how recently this occurred, there isn't a lot of information on how this happened or who did it, and parts of Markvision's website are still offline. Markvision would not comment for the story. I'm guessing it will take a while to figure out exactly what happened. However, their lack of disclosure, plus still having parts of their website down almost a week after the fact will certainly hurt Markvision's business.

Markvision obviously needs to create better security for their website so that a similar event doesn't happen again. Office Depot really wasn't at fault in this case, but they may want to pull the webcam from their shelves and look into their working relationship with Markvision. For the individual users affected, things are a little more complicated. Oftentimes, when people see a virus scan, or something that looks like a scan, pop up, they panic thinking their computer is infected. These sorts of programs can convince unaware people to give their credit card numbers because they think they need to update their antivirus. Instead, these fake anti-viruses end up just gathering credit card numbers. The biggest way for people to not fall prey to this is to know the details of their own antivirus. Knowing what the company is called and what a legitimate scan looks like could help them realize if they are seeing a fake or legimiate scan.

On a related note, I recently had a similar attack on my computer in which at least one symptom was a fake virus scan. I never even clicked on the scan because I figured out it was fake, but I waited too long to get it fixed. It corrupted my hard drive completely so OIT had to wipe out everything on my computer. So this is really serious. Trust me, you don't want it to happen to you.


http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141773/Thanksgiving_Webcam_promo_leads_to_malware?taxonomyId=17