SAN FRANCISCO: Hackers are increasingly hiding viruses in bogus computer security software to trick people into installing treacherous programme s on machines, Microsoft warned on Wednesday.
The software giant said in a security intelligence report that "rogue security software" is a growing threat as hackers take advantage of people's fears of worms such as the notorious Conficker.
"Rogue security software is the number one threat worldwide," said George Stathakopoulos, general manager of the Trustworthy Computing Group at Microsoft.
"If you think about the Conficker case, how many people went looking for a security solution and downloaded rogue malware?" Rogue security software referred to as "scareware" pretends to check computers for viruses, and then claims to find dangerous infections that the programme will fix for a fee.
"The rogue software lures them into paying for protection that, unknown to them, is actually malware offering little or no real protection, and is often designed to steal personal information," Microsoft said.
Two "rogue families" of scareware were detected in 1.5 million computers, according to Microsoft. Another form of scareware was found on 4.4 million computers, a rise of 66 per cent from the previous six-month period.
"That means when users downloaded the software they probably gave away credit card numbers and got infected," Stathakopoulos said. "That's a double hit."
Microsoft releases security reports twice annually. Stathakopoulos expects scareware infections to soar in the first six months of this year because of massive hype regarding Conficker.