Zone Alarm Scareware

[philosoraptor42]

Naturally when I first saw this message I was a little terrified. However, this isn't actually a virus alert. Several different people (see comments) dealing with customer services were given this identical response:

The message you received was an alert to a particular virus threat. This alert does NOT say you have a virus, only that you need to protect yourself from it. Please disregard the message if you already have an anti-virus solution in place.

This alone is an admission that the above image is basically an advert, however the tactics are even more underhand than that. Clicking on the buttons at the bottom send you to a webpage not only strongly suggesting that you pay for the full version of Zone Alarm, but also telling you that a number of virus detectors will not be able to find the virus they are warning you about.

This is ludicrous scare tactics because, while the Zeus trojan is real, the strand of it they are claiming to have special virus detecting powers over is actually entirely fabricated. But how can I be so sure that they aren't talking about a real virus threat?

While we can’t verify the validity of ZoneAlarm’s zeus threat. I can safely assume that it was a fake-one. Why? Because there’s no such thing as a Zeus with a string-ending of ‘Aoaq’. A generic zeus Trojan will be detected by anti-virus as Zeus.Zbot. But there’s no such thing as ‘aoaq’ ending. Obviously, that name was just appended to its the generic-name to make it sound like a real zeus Trojan.

So, if you are using the free version of Zone Alarm and see the above warning, don't panic. It's scareware. Just use your normal virus and malware protection programs as usual if you feel like putting your mind at reat. This message is simply Zone Alarm making use of pop-up advertising. Annoying, but not the end of the world.