I received a message in Skype today, it went a little something like this:

Let’s be honest, Skype is a great service with a valuable chat system built into it, but sometimes it kind of sucks. There’s just no better way to put it, but griping about Skype in general could take pages, so we’re just going to laugh at this beauty of a spam-scam instead.

Main lol Factor: I’m Not Running Windows

The way skype chats work is that the name of the party you’re chatting with takes up the whole menu bar of the chat-window. In this case, the window suddenly looks very official because it’s now (rather ominously) named “Registry Security.” It’s partly what makes this scam so well-engineered. If I had been running Windows, this would have looked similar to an official notice from Microsoft. That’s the first thing they did right when they cooked up this scheme.

The other two parts that make up the Trifecta are the fact that the scammer managed to register a domain that looks extremely trustworthy (updatealert.net) and the well-polished presentation of the scam itself. They actually put some effort into mimicking real malware warnings.

The sad fact is that many people would actually be fooled by this. It looks legit enough for people to suddenly forget the fact that Microsoft wouldn’t contact them via Skype.

Here’s what Norton had to say about updatealert.net

Image: Norton SafeWeb