SAN JOSE, Ca. – Researchers from McAfee’s Avert Labs are warning people not to fall for get rich quick schemes that are starting to stream into their e-mail inboxes.

These schemes are basically chain letters that are based on the age-old pyramid scheme of having people send a certain amount of money to a person at the top of a list of names and addresses, to which they add their own name to the bottom, in hopes of eventually getting lots of money once their name reaches the top.

“These rip-off schemes have reached the Internet a long time ago,” said Francois Paget, a researcher with McAfee’s Avert labs. “Chain letters are now disseminated over the Internet [and] rely on copying and e-mailing your contacts rather than the established paper method.”

Paget explained that when somebody decides to enter the chain, they would send money to the participant on the top of the list via PayPal. His e-mail address would then be displayed when they run the software. After payment, the recipient is supposed to send back a registration key that modifies the configuration by entering the details of the gullible caller at the fourth place and thus altering the list of previous participants. Having done this, the updated file must be sent out to as many people as it is possible to entice more victims and gradually push the sender to the top of the list.

He added that while these schemes are not dangerous to a person’s computer as they are neither malware nor adware, and that people sending the money are acting on their own accord, the practice is illegal in many countries and PayPal forbids the use of their system for such activities.

For protection from these schemes, Paget said that there are anti-spam solutions that are dedicated to intercepting them but added that the best way to prevent people from falling victim is to be suspicious whenever someone proposes that they can get rich quick.

In addition to warning people of new get rich schemes, McAfee also wrapped up the year it was for malware in 2007.

By the end of the year, McAfee noted 372 new threat detections per calendar day and 527 new detections per business day occurred in 2007.

As well, McAfee reported one driver written every four minutes in 2007 and 25,438 more detections were added this year than in 2005 and 2006 combined. (Those two years totaled 110,447.)

“One could almost say that malware creation has reached epidemic proportions,” said Jeff Green, a researcher with McAfee’s Avert Labs. “We are seeing more malware than ever before, even though the lifespan of most malware is decreasing! The average lifespan of malware with criminal intent may only be five to seven hours. Most of it is static and obfuscated. Much of it is stealthy. Never forget that it is almost completely financially motivated these days.”

He added that data security and the security industry itself have seen many changes throughout 2007. “Technologies such as virtualization and RFID will have an enormous impact on data security, posing new challenges (and some of the same old ones) to the industry as we move forward to secure these new vectors.”

This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnectIT

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