Rogue Spyware

[Absinthe]

Want to know what Rogue Software is?

I'll tell you because my home PC got infected with it last night

All of the sudden, my screen was flooded by pop-ups, saying that my PC is infected by some malicious virus and I need to downoald some antivirus to repair the damage (I didn't of course), but even clicking the (X) button on those pop-ups will result in the opening of even more pop-ups.

Then I google searched and found that these are the symptoms of rogue software:

The main goal of rogue software makers is to install and sell their product. In order to attempt to install their program, fake Windows dialog boxes are often displayed attempting to entice the user to click on them. Most of the time, they will display a message such as "WARNING! Your computer is infected with Spyware/Adware/Viruses! Buy [software name] to remove it!", a variant of which will say "Click OK to scan your system" instead of asking the user to outright buy the software. Usually, when the dialog box's OK button is clicked, this will direct the user to a malicious website, which will install the program.

I have been infected with this one, in particular: Antivirus 2009

I noticed, that on top of everything else, this bugger somehow managed to deactivate NOD32, my default antivirus. I can't believe how pervasive it is!

I was so pissed off.
I don't know where I got it from as I don't visit suspicious sites (torrent search engines) or click on suspicious links, ever.

Anyways, my boyfriend said that this pain in the @$$ is very hard to remove from the system so we'll have to format the C:\

Luckily, most of my data was stored in another partition, and I backed up the rest of it last night. I just hope the files aren't infected as well.

[Arrow Cross]

Happened to me too. Damn these paraSites.

[Absinthe]

What did you do? Did you manage to remove it?

[HawkR]

The fastest way to end such things when the pop-up windows comes up is to press ctrl+atl+del and enter procecces, here you end the procces iexplorer.exe(make sure the "i" is there. do NOT end explorer.exe) or whatever, then scan your pc with everything you got. I did this last night, worked fine for me.

[Arrow Cross]

What did you do? Did you manage to remove it?

Not completely, but I annihilated most of it by scans with multiple programs. I still have to format today - after some four years - because of the damage it made.

[Vulpix]

I advise you all to have a good firewall like Zone Alarm installed.

Have more than one partition, with the system on C:\ and the data on another partition.

Back up your most important files.

And do ShieldsUP! tests. Especially the "All System Ports" test!

You should aim for this result:

[Beorn]

That link I sent you will do the trick. Perhaps you should tell us how it goes. It got rid of mine after two scans.

[Absinthe]

With the help of Spybot Search & Destroy, I *think* I killed it.

At least it was detected and supposedly deleted, and I've had no problems whatsoever since yesterday morning

[SwordoftheVistula]

Between an old pirated copy of Nortons and Spybot I've done pretty well. The best way is to not click on these stupid links in the first place. If all else fails, do a system restore in combination with Spybot/AV, this usually does the trick.