Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Another encounter with a fake anti virus

Back in March 2009 I had to replace my hard drive in my laptop and start over once again.  There was some sort of virus on there and nothing could find it.  About 6 months later MalWare Bytes (MBAM) found about 5 infections on the old hard drive and fixed them.  That was my first encounter with the fake anti-virus virus.  Now I see that about once or twice a week.  When I google for something I try to look at the URL and make sure that it is a valid, well known web site before I click on it.

Recently I was looking up my moms address to help my daughters find their way there.  One of the links I clicked on went to mapquest and I went there because I wanted to see if it had her road properly identified.  However when I tried to exit that web site this poped up on my screen.

I did a 'control' then 'print screen' and then exited the fake warning screen.  Neither Kaspersky or MBAM have found anything on my computer so an infection might have been avoided this time, so far the warning message has not come back.

Another new weapon in the virus war is 'auto runs'.  I have used it to fix a Windows Vista machine as well as my computer at work.  You can use 'auto runs' to go in there and shut down all kinds of things.  It is easy to get carried away and shut down too much, but then you can go back and re-enable it. 

I need to use 'auto runs' on my laptop because every time I use it I end up doing an 'alternate', 'control', 'delete' and shutting down a bunch of junk before the computer will behave properly.  No anti-virus has found any virus on that computer.

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