Day 10 - Antivirus Pro 2010

A bit of a late post but the photo was taken on day 10.  I thought I'd be a bit late with the post as I was going out shopping with the girls to get a birthday present for my wife but it ended up being a lot later due to this spyware on my youngest daughters computer.  Last Sunday was taken up trying to sort it out and then I've been putting off looking at it during the week but I thought it was time to tackle the problem today.

This spyware is a fake anti virus program that tries to scare people into registering for a program to get rid of all the viruses that it pretends to find on their computer.  Fortunately my daughter wasn't fooled by this and didn't click the link.  I read on the internet that people have given their card details to these scum and ended up having money being spent on their debit and credit card.

I have to say that the program looks quite convincing and also has a wide ranging effect on the computer.  Such as blocking real anti virus websites, putting up a fake Windows Security centre screen, patching regedit to give a message that it has been disabled by the administrator, popping up a variety of official looking messages and somehow replicating itself on reboot if you do manage to delete the .exe file. After spending several hours trying to get rid of it I finally found a program 'Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware' that appears to have got rid of all traces of it and several other things as well.

All I can say is that I hate all the bastards that produce these virus, adware, spyware and malware programs. I've got better things to do with my life than spend my time sorting out the mess they make and trying to prevent it happening again.  My daughter was so upset that she was going to lose all the stuff she's been doing at university for the last four years.