A virus or trojan invades your computer and can erase your valuable data such as pictures or private documents or steal passwords and user names for your important online accounts. More importantly, the virus can replicate itself to other computers secretly by sending emails to people in your address list without you knowing. Why would anyone want to do this you ask? Well historically viruses were all about the hacker becoming famous or popular among their peers, but today things have dramatically changed. The viruses and malware today have one major goal in mind…..making money from the end user.
Today’s most popular virus family is known as the “FakeAlert” Trojan which attempts to lure an unsuspecting user to a fake website and tricks the user into clicking one pop up that installs a tiny piece of software on your computer. It then downloads a larger piece of software secretly and masquerades as a legitimate anti-virus program such as Security 2010 or XP Security (see example) which are very popular. These fake programs keep scaring the user by informing them they have a virus or piece of malware on their computer with constant pop ups that constantly annoy the user. These pop ups attempt to direct the user to a website where the user MUST purchase the full version of the anti-virus program in order to get it cleaned. If the user believes the extortion attempt then they pay the $30 or $40 to the hacker and the hacker achieves their goal. Worst of all the program rarely removes itself from the computer even if you have paid the requested amount. They usually stay on the computer and attempt to extort additional money.
So the question is how do you remove this horrible piece of software from your PC. Well if you took the right precautions you probably have a legitimate anti-virus product like McAfee, Symantec, or Trend on your machine already and you are wondering why didn’t my anti-virus product stop this infection in the first place? Especially when you are paying $40 a year for this so-called protection. The simple answer is that there is no security solution on the market today that can stop every single threat or trojan out on the Internet. Therefore you need to use alternate means to remove your infection.
Of course you can attempt to remove the infection manually which means killing the virus process. Your average technical user, will bring up Windows Task Manager and find the offending process and try to kill it. If only it were that easy. The trojans nowadays are very well written and will do everything they can to try and stop you from removing them. This means many times task manager will be completely disabled. So then you can try to use alternate tools like one of our favorites which is Process Explorer by Sysinternals. Even then the malware will attempt to stop you from getting to the website to download the tool. Essentially, you have to be extremely technical to manually remove the trojan on your own. We wish we could outline every single step of the manual removal process but it’s simply impossible because every trojan is different and there is no manual removal process that will work on all trojans.
So here’s the next best thing. There are some great removal tools out there that do the entire removal job for you without you doing anything too technical. Hands down, the best removal tool for the latest trojans and viruses is MalwareBytes. This tool does a great job of removing the latest threats especially the entire FakeAlert family of trojans. Best of all its free (they also offer a paid version of the program) So all you need to do is download MalwareBytes to your PC, update with the latest signatures for all the new threats out there and scan your system. Unfortunately the guy sitting in China who wrote the trojan is well-aware that you will eventually attempt this and has done everything in his power to try and stop you. This means if you try to go the MalwareBytes website you will be redirected to an alternate website that hosts a fake version of MalwareBytes that does not help you. This all depends on the skill and knowledge of the author. Sometimes you will be lucky enough to download MalwareBytes on your machine and remove the infection and other times you will need some technical expertise. We will write another article on some techniques you can use to get around the trojan that is preventing you from downloading MalwareBytes. In the mean time our technical experts at BoxAid do this every single day. Give us a call at 866.999.3578 or visit our home page for more information.
About George Dover
George Dover is one of the Microsoft Certified Technicians that works at BoxAid.com. He is the primary blog contributor and has helped thousands of customers calling into BoxAid on a daily basis. Connect with me on Google+
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