Have you turned on your computer one day to find that you got tons of pop-ups telling you that your computer is infected, that the virus has been identified and you need to clean it immediately? Most people have their “spidey senses” go off and know there is something wrong. Actually, there is something wrong. Their system is infected by scareware trying to get the user to go out to a site and “buy” software to “fix” the problem. In reality, they charge your card and then turn off the pop-ups. It is a big scam that is happening more and more all the time.
Last weekend, I got a call from my sister where this very thing was happening. Every time she tried to close a window, another one would pop-up. The malware disabled her anti-virus program (which was unfortunately not up-to-date). It slowed her computer down by 90% and was even difficult to get a browser window up (we had to leave all the pop-up messages up while trying to navigate in the browser). First we had to get to a website that can do an active scan of your system for free right there (without having to download and install any software). We went out to Panda’s website (because I knew they had one…but there are others as well). We started that scan. While we did that, I also had her download spybot search and destroy and adaware…both decent spyware removal tools (free). One of them couldn’t get installed and loaded (looked like the malware was blocking it), but the other one did work. We also ran that scan. That seemed to help a little bit, but upon reboot, we were still getting the messages. We were able to get to other sites a bit easier however. I was going to have her purchase some new AV software, but it happened to be the same day that Microsoft released their brand new free anti-virus software. So we downloaded that, installed and ran that. Once that was finished we seemed to be back to 100%. The sad thing is that my sister (at this same time) heard from several friends that were all having similar problems but did not know what they could do to fix the issue.
This type of malware is really scary…what they can do with system.
