Antivirus Live: Not Helping to Protect
If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that in these past few days I have had some problems with Windows. But then again, who hasn’t? Now, I’m not trying to angle this post at the problems of Windows, or even OS X for that matter, but rather focusing on what happened
Odds are, if you’re running Windows, you have probably had a virus. Plain and simple, Windows is prone to viruses. A few years back, I made the awful mistake of letting a friend on my computer. Now, it wasn’t just that he was on my computer, but it was what he did rather. He was into all of the online games, and back then, I wasn’t as tech-savvy so I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t really pay much attention as to what sites he was on, but the next day, I found out the hard way. After logging onto Windows, I was immediately flooded with popups upon popups. I would say around 50 every ten minutes. Of course, it was then I knew I had a virus. At the time I was running Symantec’s Norton antivirus. Needles to explain why, the virus got past.
But that was a few years ago, and to this day I have had no other viruses on mycomputer. I should also mention that I am running ESET’s NOD32, might explain as to why I haven’t gotten them. But yesterday I was alarmed at my dad’s computer. He brought it up to me and he was in panic mode. On the desktop, there were about thirty websites that were popping up and what looked to be a antivirus that was alerting him that he had a virus. The problem? Well of course the websites/popups but also the antivirus message. He didn’t have an antivirus and it certainly wasn’t Windows Security. A few weeks ago his subscription to Norton ran out, and well, he just never really got around to the store for what I was recommending, NOD32. So, you could say, he had this coming. The fake antivirus program was called Antivirus Live, of course looking like a real antivirus solution.
So, seeing this virus on his computer, I immediately told him to head to the store and purchase NOD32. He did, and when he got back I wanted to install it right away. But I couldn’t. The virus was not allowing me to open anything .exe. Such as task manager etc. With this in mind, I downloaded MalwareBytes fromhttp://malwarebytes.org/ and then put it on a flash drive. After, I rebooted the computer into safe mode with networking and installed MalwareBytes directly from the flash drive. After that, I completed a full system scan which did indeed detect quite a few infected items. When it was finished I of course chose to remove them and then rebooted back into normal Windows mode. Bingo! The popups were gone and task manager was finally accessible! So, with this good to go, I popped in the NOD32 install disc and went to it. It installed with no problem and then proceeded to complete one full system scan, where it removed any leftovers.
Now the computer is good to go. With a fresh copy of NOD32 on it and rid of the virus it was set. The funny thing was that my friend mentioned he had this same virus and same fake antivirus running, so I happily went over there and removed it, doing the same method as above. I’m curious, have you had this virus? If not, know anyone who has?
Comments are welcome.
