« Anti-Christian Violence in Orissa, India Going Strong Again | Main | One of a Hundred - page 109 - Matlock is On »
Computer Funkiness, or “I Hate Antivirus XP 2008!”
By Marc | September 4, 2008
If you were expecting the comic today, I wasn’t able to get it finished last night because of an emergency on our laptop last night.
Somehow, we became an unfortunate candidate for a nasty malware program called “Antivirus XP 2009″. I got most of it taken care of last night, and am still attempting to clean up the mess today.
According to an article on Bleeping Computer:
Antivirus XP 2008 is a new rogue anti-spyware program that is advertised through Trojans and other malware. It is advertised in the form of fake security alerts and warnings on web sites that state you are infected with malware or are being attacked in some manner. When you click on these ads, it will automatically download the installer for Antivirus XP 2008 and install it on your machine. In some cases, this program is installed without any intervention at all from you.
Once installed, Antivirus XP 2008 will scan your computer and display a variety of security risks found on your computer that can only be removed if you purchase a license of the software. These risks, though, are all fake and are only being displayed to scare you into thinking you are infected and thus purchase their software. Another tactic that Antivirus XP 2008, and the accompanied malware, uses is to change your desktop background to be a message stating you are infected, popups and fake alerts stating your computer is being attacked, and a fake Internet Explorer page that states Google has found your computer to be infected. All of these are further scare tactics and should be ignored.
We didn’t click on anything to install it. It just got in and took root. Another fun thing about it is that it will hijack your browsers so that search engine results get redirected to bogus sites when clicked, and certain sites (especially ones related to getting rid of the blasted thing) “don’t exist” when typed into the address bar. It makes for some much needed quality time for you and your computer.
It also attacks other portions of Windows such as the system restore feature making it impossible to restore to a previous date.
Our antivirus software, BitDefender, picked up that the malware was present and told us it was “taken care of”, but it still slipped by.
There are a few applications you can download to get rid of it. The three main ones that are suggested are:
- Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
- SmitFraudFix
- Combofix - (edit 10:54 am - I just read this)
Most of the forums I’ve been on have suggested using at least two of the programs to make sure it’s gone.
Symantec has some helpful information on this malware and some instructions for getting rid of it.
Finally, as a last resort, XP-Vista.com has instructions on manually removing the stuff.
If you were looking forward to the comic, it will be finished today to be posted tomorrow morning.
Topics: Site News |
September 4th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Good luck getting rid of that. I had something very similar hit my work laptop when i was using it away from the office. I have no idea where it came from but I finally had to have the IT people reimage my hard drive to get rid of it. huge pain. lucky for us we have an automatic backup system that scans our systems daily to back everything up.
September 4th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I had that one, and cleaning it out deleted some vital parts of my system last week. I had to reinstall my system from the ground up