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Maybe Even A Galaxy
Mar. 22nd, 2010 08:11 pmMy previous computer came with Norton Antivirus, I think, but at some point I got annoyed with it (I don't even remember why precisely, now, but I'm sure you can come up with a reason) and replaced it with the free version of AVG. AVG did me fine for a number of years. In the last couple they started nagging me to buy the full version, and only begrudgingly let me upgrade to the next free version.
Maybe that's why I've been through three viruses in the last month and a half, because I haven't been shelling out for an actual commercial product. Or maybe viruses have just been getting better, I don't know.
The first one I was made aware of by my son Simon when he came up from his after-school computer time, all upset about the virus warnings that were popping up. I went downstairs to take a look at it, and quickly concluded that there was something wrong, but not what these antivirus popups were telling me. Because it was certainly not AVG displaying these warnings, but some program I hadn't heard of, "Antivirus Soft".
A quick Google on the matter showed the true culprit--a fake antivirus virus. One of these viruses will lodge itself in your computer, hook itself into your setup, and then proceed to make you think that you're infected with a bunch of other stuff, and insist that you need to buy the commercial version of itself to disinfect. Seems like a weird sort of scam, but I suppose some people must fall for it.
The disinfection process seemed a little complex. First I had to download a new antivirus program, MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, and then run it in safe mode, and then again in regular mode. It worked, but it took forever. You see, last year I got myself a big new 1.5TB drive, being annoyed with how my tiny 320GB one was beginning to fill up. At the moment, I'm revelling in the extra space so much that I've almost given up on deleting things. I pay a price for it when my antivirus program has to scan through all of my disks to remove everything. But, 12 hours or so later, it had finished both scans and I was all fixed.
A few weeks later, the same thing happened, only this time it was a different program, "XP Antivirus 2010" or something like that. Apparently these things are bypassing my antivirus software by getting my permission to install them...because they consider clicking on the "X" on the popup to be permission to install. Grumble. I ran my antivirus overnight again, and got rid of that one.
But now I've got a slightly less annoying but more persistent problem, some kind of adware thing. It doesn't happen constantly, but if I click on links from Google or Facebook, I am often diverted to another site, one that I manifestly did not click on. However, MBAM isn't doing a thing against this one, even when I ran it in safe mode. Maybe my previous infections have hollowed out my antivirus programs to the point of uselessness; maybe this is just too new and hasn't made it into the databases yet; or maybe I just need to stop settling for free products and buy something after all.
Maybe that's why I've been through three viruses in the last month and a half, because I haven't been shelling out for an actual commercial product. Or maybe viruses have just been getting better, I don't know.
The first one I was made aware of by my son Simon when he came up from his after-school computer time, all upset about the virus warnings that were popping up. I went downstairs to take a look at it, and quickly concluded that there was something wrong, but not what these antivirus popups were telling me. Because it was certainly not AVG displaying these warnings, but some program I hadn't heard of, "Antivirus Soft".
A quick Google on the matter showed the true culprit--a fake antivirus virus. One of these viruses will lodge itself in your computer, hook itself into your setup, and then proceed to make you think that you're infected with a bunch of other stuff, and insist that you need to buy the commercial version of itself to disinfect. Seems like a weird sort of scam, but I suppose some people must fall for it.
The disinfection process seemed a little complex. First I had to download a new antivirus program, MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, and then run it in safe mode, and then again in regular mode. It worked, but it took forever. You see, last year I got myself a big new 1.5TB drive, being annoyed with how my tiny 320GB one was beginning to fill up. At the moment, I'm revelling in the extra space so much that I've almost given up on deleting things. I pay a price for it when my antivirus program has to scan through all of my disks to remove everything. But, 12 hours or so later, it had finished both scans and I was all fixed.
A few weeks later, the same thing happened, only this time it was a different program, "XP Antivirus 2010" or something like that. Apparently these things are bypassing my antivirus software by getting my permission to install them...because they consider clicking on the "X" on the popup to be permission to install. Grumble. I ran my antivirus overnight again, and got rid of that one.
But now I've got a slightly less annoying but more persistent problem, some kind of adware thing. It doesn't happen constantly, but if I click on links from Google or Facebook, I am often diverted to another site, one that I manifestly did not click on. However, MBAM isn't doing a thing against this one, even when I ran it in safe mode. Maybe my previous infections have hollowed out my antivirus programs to the point of uselessness; maybe this is just too new and hasn't made it into the databases yet; or maybe I just need to stop settling for free products and buy something after all.
