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Scareware on the up


dieseltaylor

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=4297

Please read as even reputable sites can infect you. And it is a bugger to get rid of - a friend of mine caught one today. Fortunately he did not dive into the Anti-Virus Professional site which would have truly screwed him.

Included in the article is a list of the genuine companies in the market - and its not that long.

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I got smacked with some of this last year at school. It was really nasty stuff, and looked exactly like Windows Security Software. However, you couldn't right click on this icon in the taskbar, and it was doing things that WSS obviously wouldn't do. I can see how people not as aware of their computers could fall victim. I had McAfee with a couple of anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ons, for all the good they did. Every time I tried to run a system scan I would get a blue screen. I forget the name of the virus, but it was pretty cutting edge when I had it, and it apparently even affected Macs (I almost root for Mac-infecting viruses). Malwarebytes and HijackThis cleared it up.

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I couple of years ago my mum's pc got infected with some sort of Smitfraud variant that was very hard to get rid of. It insisted that you purchase some dodgy AV software to be able to remove it. The AV and malware software of the time got rid of most of the files but there were still some lurking in the windows directory that couldn't be deleted by any program running in a windows environment. These files continued to recreate the files that were able to be removed via AV software.

Luckily she still had a FDD and I still had a DOS boot floppy. The only way to remove the offending files was to boot from the FDD and use the old command line functions to find and delete. I suppose there are more resiliant programs out there now that allow you to delete files even if they are locked as windows system files by the virus/ransomware.

Well I hope there is because who has an FDD nowadays?

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As he could not get online because of all the crep popping up I took him AntiMalware today - took 15 minutes to put him right. Than Goo he did not do anything stupid like going to the Anti_virus site

I had a programmer stop me in the hallway to ask me if I could look at her personal laptop - her kids followed the path, and I am sure it is severely jacked up now.

Hopefully my customized Windows PE CD can take it out.

Often enough though, something is really broken, and what you have is data recovery using a boot CD and a USB drive followed by a complete reload.

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