Antiviral ‘Scareware’ Just One More Intruder
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — How much money can criminals make scaring naïve computer users? Try $5 million a year.

That is how much a marketing associate of one Russian operation appears to be earning from its sales of fake antivirus software through an elaborate scheme that relies on e-mail spam and indirectly controlling thousands of unprotected PCs, according to internal company files posted online by a Russian hacker.

Mr. Stewart also discovered that when the Bakasoftware program starts, it checks the language of the computer user based on information contained in the Windows operating system. If it finds the personal computer of a Russian language speaker, the program terminates.