Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Another Virus

I seem to have fallen prey to another computer virus. It isn't letting me access my emails, so it I don't respond to comments on here or emails you have sent, I am not ignoring you intentionally.

This virus calls itself "Antivirus 2009" and pretends to be from Microsoft. When I roll the mouse over any of its links, they lead to "microsoft.securityinfohelp.com/..." with other things after the slash. But when I type that in, without all the stuff after the slash, it either takes me to the microsoft page or it blocks the page with a warning from itself. Even the pages it allows me to access, it puts a warning bar across the top of the page with a little warning shield and saying "The page you are opening is probably contains spyware, adware, etc.. Your system might be at risk, Click here to protect your system with Antivirus 2009."

Well, I have now gotten into my email through a roundabout way, but I don't know how long it will last. Wish me luck.

UPDATE: McAfee's virus removal service got rid of it, after everything else I tried failed. Thanks for all the suggestions, and thanks to McAfee!

7 comments:

  1. You could try Malwarebytes, or the latest version of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool (for a given value of "malicious", that is).

    Mark Odell

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  2. Install spybot from here (http://www.safer-networking.org/), set expert mode, install all updates, immunize everything, scan and fix everything, reboot, repeat.

    Install hostsman from here (http://www.abelhadigital.com/2008/07/hostsman-3157-released.html) and set the MVPS hosts file to auto-update and the program to run automatically at startup.

    Oh, and get a proper virus scanner, with a subscription. I use NOD32: www.eset.com

    Good luck.

    ReplyDelete
  3. MS Windows itself is a virus.

    My advice: Ditch the virii once and for all by replacing them with one of the *nix variants.

    The Ubuntu distro is probably the easiest one to use when you first migrate away from windows.

    http://www.ubuntu.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Avast! is a great, free, anti-spy/anti-virus product.

    Good luck!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Have just removed this from a customer's computer and documented the procedure on my blog, see http://www.scp-computers.co.uk/blogs

    Hope it helps.

    ReplyDelete
  6. My wife's machine got it. Every other page or so, it redirected to microsoft.securityinfohelp.com.

    I followed the steps in scpcomp's post. That got rid of part of it, but it wasn't everything. I also ended up deleting winconfig.dll, I believe it was in windows\system32.

    Good luck to anyone who has this nasty virus.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Cool post you got here. I'd like to read more concerning this matter. The only thing it would also be great to see here is a few photos of some gizmos.
    Jeff Trider
    Cell jammer

    ReplyDelete