We don’t usually talk about support scams on this blog because in the past, the scammers haven’t usually had a script prepared for Mac users. However, Jerome Segura has an interesting blog article for Malwarebytes that describes how a company called Speak Support offering “Mac® Techical Support” (that’s the site’s misspelling, not mine or Segura’s) misuses ping to convince a victim that he has no protective software installed by going to a site called protection.com that doesn’t respond to the ping utility. (Yes, this would translate to a Windows attack, too, though I haven’t seen that reported yet.)
I’ll probably look at this and some other recent support scam developments in more depth in a week or two on the ESET blog, since that’s my usual venue for tracking this stuff. (I’m taking some time out from security at the moment. Mostly…)
In the meantime, you might find the Malwarebytes resource page here of some use and interest. And a paper I put together for Virus Bulletin 2012 with Martijn Grooten of Virus Bulletin, Steve Burn of Malwarebytes, and independent researcher Craig Johnston: My
PC has 32,539 errors: how telephone support scams really work (though that’s strictly Windows-specific).
David Harley
Mac Virus 
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