We have been getting more and more support calls about people getting incessant pop-ups saying they are infected with a virus or spyware and the program Antivirus 2009 is cleaning this up or needs to be installed to do so. If you have been infected, you’ll know all to well what I’m talking about. This Antivirus 2009 program is flat out spyware and is not the easiest thing to uninstall. If you got it, the below may help. It seems that different cleaning programs help different PC’s so if one does not work, try another.
What to do if you are infected
- Download and run Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php). This is a free download.
- Shutdown your computer and then power it back up. Make sure you do the Shutdown option where you then need to press the power button to boot back up.
- Run the cleaner program again and repeat until there are not more spyware programs found.
- If the Malabytes program does not do the trip for you, try using Spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html) or Ad-Aware (http://lavasoft.com/single/trialpay.php). These are also free downloads.
How to keep spyware from infecting you in the first place
- Do not click on any files or links from emails that you are not sure who sent them to you. Trust me, no one is suddenly sending you a greeting card every day asking you the click the link to see it.
- Be wary of what websites you go to. Just the other day I was searching for some software technology for a client using Google and thought I found a great site so I clicked the link and ended up in one of those sites you don’t want your kids to find. just by going to the site the page tried downloading Antivirus 2009 on my machine with no way to get out of the site. I had to do the old Ctrl-Alt-Del and use Task Manager to end the web page.
- Make sure you have updated antivirus and spyware protection and run these programs proactively every week or month.
- Proactively block known web sites or programs so they will not run in the first place so you cannot get infected at all.
The good thing is that if you do happen to get infected, there is a cure. We have seen some instances of spyware completely killing a PC so be sure you backup your files on a regular basis. Even better, use Waident to provide responsive end user support and to manage all of your technology so we can proactively scan for spyware and viruses to help prevent any downtime in the first place.
