Virus Info - Hoax Viruses

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These nasty hoax viruses are sweeping the country; it's an epidemic. In my testing, I have not found ANY of the major antivirus programs such as Norton, McAfee, Trend-Micro, AVAST. Webroot, AVG or other programs such as Spysweeper able to handle these hoax/virus attacks and defeat it.

The virus usually comes from infected websites, usually websites from small companies, that have been hacked by some pretty smart bad-guys. Or, you may encounter the virus by going to a website that has been listed in a Google search. The infected websites can be very innocent sites, offering cookie recipes, genealogy records and horse riding equipment. And certainly, sites containing pornography or "free music" are also often infected.

The bad guys far far away know that Americans have credit cards, and they use them to purchase things on the Internet. They also know that companies like Norton and McAfee get customers to subscribe to their antivirus software using credit cards. The bad guys want YOUR credit card, and they have made an industry of creating website "traps" to get you to fall into their trap. These traps are unwittingly offered to you as matching websites from a Google search, but in fact they are just webpages filled with thousands of random words, yet clicking on one of these traps results in an instant download of a virus. The virus is a hoax, which acts like an antivirus program warning you of a virus infection. It offers to purge the virus (and there really isn't one) if you pay them for an updated subscription by using your credit card. The whole thing is a cruel hoax.

Upon clicking an infected website, your web browser screen suddenly announces that your computer is infected with viruses. An antivirus scan appears to start up, and it claims that it is finding dozens and dozens of infected files. It shows you detailed information with the name of the infected file and the type of virus that has infected it. Everything you see up to this point is a movie, not an actual antivirus program. And this hoax is often a movie that is not detected as a virus, so it is not stopped by popular antivirus programs.

Then a prompt for a download appears, claiming it is an update to the antivirus system. By accepting the download, you unknowingly allow the virus to download and install itself in your computer. Now the damage is done: the virus takes over Windows start up routines, and cannot be erased manually, even in Safe Mode.

The purpose of most of these hoax/viruses is to convince you your computer is infected with dozens of viruses, and that you need to download a new antivirus program or an update to your existing antivirus program in order to remove these infected files. The download is nothing but a virus itself, that keeps demanding $49.95 by a credit card payment to obtain a "full version" of the antivirus software that will clean your system. Even if you pay the money, the hoax/virus never goes away.

Some versions do nasty things to your computer, such as disable the Task Manager (Ctl Alt Delete), they don't let you change the background picture, and they disable Registry Editor, making it extremely difficult to remove the virus and get the system back to normal.

In my experience, the only way to remove the virus is to run a separate operating system CD disc such as those available from Norton/Symantec or AVG. Personally, I remove the infected files manually with my own special CD disc, because I have learned the techniques the virus developers have used.

In general, I can remove these viruses in 60 to 90 minutes, and I leave you with a number of free tools which scan your system to ensure no remnant of the virus is left.

Please call me to discuss your situation and to learn more about how I can help you deal with this issue.