Watch out for Fake AntiVirus Programs

May 23, 2009 porkchop 8 comments

I have to write about this since I know of someone who I helped to try to get rid of this Virus he had on his computer. This has to be one of the worst viruses I have seen in a long time. What the attacker usually does is they setup a domain and webpage, saying they offer AntiVirus protection from some kind of no-named company which anybody can fall for, its very professional, and the program does look and feel like a AntiVirus program. Here is a screenshot of one.

What it basically does is it does a fake scan without your promession, then detects thousands of fake viruses, the program’s scam is that the threats it detects cannot be deleted, just found, until you pay for it. But the Virus scanner does not work, its fake, so you are paying for nothing, a scam! The worst part of this fake virus scanner is that it tricks Windows Security Center, the error that comes up on the taskbar stating that your computer is not protected. If you do not pay for this fake virus scanner, it keeps popping up saying that your computer is infected. It also spoof’s your browser, my friend had it bad, his actually took control of which sites he could visit, and it even disabled him from updating a lot of the spyware programs, and also preventing him from running them. This shows that you should always keep your programs up to date and scan frequently so this doesn’t happen. That part is the worst part, since it makes it virtually impossible to delete this spyware, since it actually blocks sites to even download stuff to clean it up. In the end we managed to remove some of it and got Internet access back, but this was after hours of messing with it, and loading files onto a USB stick, to try to clean it up, from my computer. Later that day I put the USB stick in my computer, and my AntiVirus was going crazy, picking things up, so that virus on his computer, infected that USB stick, but luckily my security caught it.

The problem with this virus is that they have many different names for it, such as Anti-Virus 1, Antivirus 2010, and many more. I think this even installs when you visit a site and it comes up with click here to install, if you do not looking at it, then you are infected. That is why I suggest you use McAfee SiteAdvisor which I wrote about before, in the article Computer Security, the link is here http://www.siteadvisor.com/ What this will do to help protect, is that it will flag the known URL’s of these bad virus scanners. And also keep all your protection up to date. If you are infected with this, and didn’t have enough protection at time, you may just have to reformat your computer.