Scareware came by its name honestly (or perhaps dishonestly). The particular strain of malware we are looking at here (distributed as UltraDefragger and SystemRecovery) attempts to ensnare unwary users by displaying sensational and frightening alerts.
As Symantec recently discovered, the bad guys have added a new twist to their fake disk defragmentation tools: falsely notifying users that a hard drive is about to fail. Like so many other rogue applications, this “recovery tool” is designed to trick users into purchasing a paid application which can fix the problems that were detected. In truth, of course, there were no problems and there is no fix.
