'MICROSOFT WINDOWS With Pre-installed Mcafee' Scam Attempts to Phish Victims
A new scam is making the rounds, disseminated through malicious links. The scam is called "MICROSOFT WINDOWS With Pre-installed Mcafee" and combines elements found in both tech support scams and phishing campaigns.
When a user lands on the web page of the scam, they are greeted with a website that is a poorly constructed attempt to mimic the official McAfee page, abusing the official logo of the legitimate software.
Victims landing on the page are told they are running a version of Windows that has the McAfee software "pre-installed". For some strange reason, under this text, there is a large "START INSTANT CLEAN UP!" button.
A less tech-savvy user's first reaction might be to click that large button. This will open up a new page, which holds the phishing page. The victims are expected to supply their email address, phone number and full real name, in order to supposedly activate the anti-virus product. Obviously, the page cannot know if you really have the software installed and is an automated attempt to phish out sensitive, personally identifiable information from victims.
Information filled into the phishing page will be funneled directly into the hands of the malicious party operating the scam and phishing page. This information can be abused in a number of ways, ranging from impersonation to committing further fraud.
Don't be fooled by fake pages asking for your information or claiming that you have viruses on your system and need an immediate security scan. A page displayed in a web browser cannot do any of this anyway and any similar warnings are scams.
