Fake Anti-Spyware Programs - Comments Page 2

Had this one last Sunday,"system tool", a pain to get rid of. Bleepingcomputer.com's help was invaluable! Rod from England.

A very good article.
Thank you

My comment regarding Trojans is "Beware of Geeks bearing gifts".

The worst are the drive-by's, the ones that download infections into your computer just from connecting to their site. And they seem to come in the form of rogue anti-malware that claims you're infected and allows NOTHING to work until you "buy" their program. (Yeah, it's infected, by your fake program!) While running Vista, I FOOLISHLY disabled the annoying User Account Control that nagged me for nearly every function in the computer. Fortunately, MalwareBytes was able to rid me of the infection, and I re-enabled UAC. Now, with Win7 and MSE, I'm fairly worry-free. On rare occasion, I'll run a scan with MalwareBytes, and sometimes Lavasoft's Ad-Aware, or Spybot just for peace of mind.

Good article, right on the money. I have been warning my friends for many months about this subject and have fixed a few computers that have been infected with fake AV. As for the real thing, I have had great success with AVG Free, SuperAnti-Spyware and Malwarebytes, all of which are totally free. I have Microsoft Security Essentials, but I'm not overly impressed with it.

The ones that I have seen in the past two years start popping up their balloons all over the place on an infected PC and take control over your system. They even went as far as uninstalling Malwarebytes.

Doing a search for the name of the software that they are trying to sell you will indeed get you (often) good instructions.

For most instances you need to download an .exe that will stop the rogue and then run Malwarebytes to clean up the remnants.

My cure is to use combofix from bleepingcomputer.com AND malware bytes AND super antispyware.com. For reasons unknown, some people(Mostly female) just keep falling for the same exact scams, over over again. You must update the latter two. You may have to uncheck the proxy server in the internet properties, if your internet is no longer working.

The first time I fell for a rogue Software program. After I just clicked on the site of PX Anti-Virus 2011. It Hijacked all my browsers, in toatl I had 36 trojans & malware installed by these Bastards. I could not even get into my Emails any longer. So please if you encounter this site - RUN RUN RUN

You may want to know that there's a fake AVG or two out there. My dad managed to snag it while he was supposed to he working... He called me in there to see what that stuff was that popped up, and you could see the obvious fake stuff. He was running Windows 7 and there was an image showing of a standard XP "my computer" screen, but with everything marked with a red infected. What was sitting in front of it? Something along the lines of "AVG Security Suite" was sitting there staring at me. It had (what was close enough to at least) the official icon set and a similar GUI to a real AVG product, but it was as fake as it gets. Removal wasn't that much of a pain, since all I had to do was delete the lone file after task killing it, but it should be known that there's a fake one out there that's lightly armed and ready to take your money.

I have had family and friends call for help with these Fake spyware programs. One i have run into several times is PC PRO. It offers a free scan and once you approve your pc is infected. System slows down, your internet has unending POP UPS. It is just a bad, nasty program. I have had success in removing it with Superantispyware. It knocks out the "PC PRO" program then cleans and PUP infections. then i follow it up with malwarebyes and that seems to do the trick.
I always advise the people never to click ok for a free scan from these predator programs.