Over the years of talking to our customers about the good and bad things on the internet; all the software that all the websites want you to download, read the privacy statements, etc., I've pretty much summed it up with "how much can you TRUST the website asking you to do that?".
New websites with cool new features pop up everyday, and existing ones disappear just as quick and often. It's hard to know who or what you can trust these days.
But who would have ever expected the latest issue to arise!?
SEARS!?!? Not the beloved SEARS company! We can DEFINITELY trust SEARS...can't we?
Well, not according to recent news - and the Federal Trade Commissions charges against them.
You can read the FTC settlement release here:http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/06/sears.shtm
And how about all the warnings we've given out over the last couple years about fake anti-virus programs...that are actually technically Viruses!?
You may have read my recent post (a couple months ago) about Facebook and MySpace and other similar websites. Now it turns out even the New York Times and CNET have been pushing out bogus ads that appear to the end user as a virus warning...and they look darn believable.
You can read a little about that here:http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=BD29ACB6-1A64-6A71-CE71420AF760C89C
This just all goes to show that you need to be CAREFUL when surfing the web now more than ever. The "web" has become an industry that is supported by advertising revenues, and the amount of advertisements being shown on a daily basis is an astronomical number. In my opinion, this type of problem is going to only get worse for quite some time. These companies do not have the infrastructure to support closely monitoring EVERY ad from every ad network that is being displayed on their websites.
If you go to a website and see ANY type of virus warning that isn't familiar to you as being the program on your computer...don't trust it. The only way to know this is for you to KNOW what the anti-virus program on your computer looks like, is named, etc. How else will you know if the "Personal Antivirus" warning you're seeing is legitimate or not (it's not, by the way)?