7 May, 2011
This week we have be inundated with new customers with viruses on their computers and laptops. There is a lot of this activity around at present and these latest virus threats are getting past the virus scanners for the moment. Why is this happening? Unfortunately people are getting suckered into clicking on a pop-up window while on the Internet which is designed to play upon their fears. For an example the window will look like an antivirus software program and say that “it has found 285 infected files on your PC – click here to fix”. This is just a phishing email or a phishing pop-up and is the precursor to the actual virus. By clicking on “fix” or even by clicking on “cancel” – both buttons are programmed to do the same thing, you are actually inviting the full virus to download to your PC. The fact that ‘you’ are inviting it to download will often get it past your real virus scanner and hence your PC gets infected with viruses. So if both buttons do the same thing how do you get rid of the message? If you know a bit about computers you can often ‘right click’ on the taskbar and tell the pop-up window to close, or go into task manager and tell it to close from there, however for many users the simplest thing it to simply tell your PC to shutdown & restart. If this pop-up window persists then you may have some greyware on the PC which still needs removing – but this is a much simpler job than removing viruses. Always have an up-to-date virus scanner on your PC and know what it brand it is – that way if you ever get a message from one of these hoax virus scanners you can identify it as malicious and deal with it properly. You may be asking what the original creator of these hoaxes gets out of all of this. Well if you keep following their directions your PC will become more and more infected and they will then ask you to ‘buy’ their ‘ultimate IT’ fix which is using your credit card to purchase more problems while losing your hard earned cash. Kerr Solutions is at 128 Musgrave Street & is contactable on 49 222 400.
