Nasty Adware

My wife got panicked by a phony virus warning and clicked on it and installed a nasty piece of adware that keeps popping up with bogus warnings of horrible Trojans and viruses. Its purpose was to con us into buying their product, Personal AV.

If you have an anti-virus program on your computer (and if you don’t, you’re asking for trouble) then the only warnings that should be popping up are from that program, not from “Windows.” If you get such a message, just close your browser fast, and stop going to sites that have these tricky programs.

What made the program particularly nasty was that although the windows had buttons that said “Close” and the program folder in the Start menu had an “Uninstall” command, they  were bogus. In fact, the program installs itself in such a way that you cannot remove it manually. And these stupid “warnings” were popping up every few seconds!

More frustrating, it slipped right past Norton Internet Security. Boo!

A Google search revealed what I was dealing with, and also the program that helped root it out:
MalwareBytes (Get a free version here). Once downloaded, click on it to install and follow the directions. Be aware that the Quick Scan took over an hour.

The difference between the free version and the commercial version is that the commercial version has real-time updates and works in the background, while the free version only works when you click on it and is not monitoring your system constantly.