RIVA RICHMOND of the New York Time’s wrote an insight piece on the fake anti virus scams are growing as an online plague, it is understood that the people running these scams were aggressively using spam, online ads and schemes to manipulate search engine results to get a grip on Web users.
Researchers at Google have concluded a 13-month study that they will present in full at a workshop on April 27.
The Google team studied 240 million malicious Web pages and found that more than 11,000 sites were used to distribute fake antivirus software, which it calls Fake AV. In these scams, victims who surf to a scammer’s Web page get hit with pop-up messages warning that their computers are infected with something terrible that can be removed for a fee. The pop-ups often won’t stop, essentially hijacking a victim’s computer, until he installs the certainly useless, potentially malicious program and pays up.
“The Fake AV threat is rising in prevalence, both absolutely and relative to other forms of Web-based malware,” Google researchers say on their site. Fake AV accounts for about 15 percent of all malware on the Web, they said.
Victims are typically lured to sites with the scams by clicking links to them in spam messages or in “poisoned” search results. Scammers are working aggressively to move their pages to the top of search results pages for keywords tied to things like celebrity foibles and big breaking news, to the point that results for “trending topics” often include several malicious results. In fact, 60 percent of the malware Google found on sites embedding popular keywords was designed to distribute fraudulent antivirus programs.
Attackers are also use online ads to try to distribute fake security software via the sites of legitimate Web publishers. Fake antivirus scams are responsible for half of all malware delivered via ads, up fivefold from a year ago, Google said.
If you see one of these pop-ups, do not install it and do not pay. Scan your system with security software from a trusted company. Microsoft offers free scans through its Windows Live safety scanner.
but lets be honest if it get’s to your PC – its already hit you, you have been lucky this time the scanner has picked it up. Who knows what will happen next time 
However If you did pay, monitor your credit card account or change your number, as it’s now in questionable hands….
however more and more people are using Docs storage repository for unusual and some times unlawful material as some spammers have just found out. Google will work with the authorities to stomp this out
Ever since people caught on to how Google used the number of incoming links to a web site in its ranking algorithms, people have tried to game the system. From selling links to creating link farms, SEO has focused much of its attention on link building over the years. As a result, the search engines have had to counter this by trying to separate good links from bad.
