Via ARS Technica
By Joel Hruska | Published: September 29, 2008 – 09:20PM CT
Microsoft and Washington State officials announced a new partnership today aimed at fighting scareware in general and one specific vendor in particular. Today isn’t such a good day for one James Reed McCreary IV, of The Woodlands, Texas. Mr. McCreary is the sole director of Branch Software, which created the Registry Cleaner XP program, and the CEO of hosting company Alpha Red. Scareware, it should be noted, isn’t malware—at least, not technically. Instead of installing its own set of viruses, worms, or Trojans, a scareware program tricks the end user into believing he or she needs the program to correct a nonexistent error within the operating system. This type of falsified error was a common tactic in the days before Windows XP’s SP1 (supposedly) closed the door that made the random pop-ups possible; I still remember seeing ads pop up on customers’ desks insisting that they needed to download Program X for $9.99 to fix this issue.
