Scarvertisment

Scarevertisment - a popup, alert, or any other indication that you may have a virus or malware on your device and tries to look as real as possible to trick the user in most casesinto calling the number provided, these alerts aim and will imitate a well known company in order to look legit. The term was coined by Jason Plimpton in 2017 to address a new security concern that is not a a popup or other window that you did not activate that tries to infect your computer, but rather to scam the user into paying for services that are unneeded and the instigator will perform a fake check or scan after paying for services. A scarevertisment is not a fraudulent update, software download, or any other vector to infect your device, but to scare the end user into thinking that there is a security issue with their device and contact the company shown in the fake popup. Some will even have audio saying there is a security issue when the scarevertisment pops up. IE and Edge are easier targets for this scam as the popup will take over while with Chrome and Firefox you are able to easily kill the scarevertisment window.

References

ScreenShots Examples:

http://www.myantispyware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/fake-Microsoft-Tech-Support.jpg

https://www.pcrisk.com/images/stories/screenshots201505/Microsoft-Security-Essentials.jpg

https://filestore.community.support.microsoft.com/api/images/1a3ec6fe-d5b7-426f-ab37-f14701782edf

This article "Scarvertisment" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Scarvertisment. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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