Monday, February 16, 2009

Counterfeit Anti-virus Programs

There are many counterfeit viruses that are being made. They look like they are from reputable sites with names like Antivirus 2009, XP Police, System Guard 2009, or Spyware 2009.

These programs usually are downloaded on your PC without your permission. If you see any pop-ups that are telling you your computer is infected and you need to scan for viruses, please follow the instructions given below. NOTE: Do not click OK or Cancel, this will install the program.

ITS has installed the Trendmicro virus protection on all SWOSU owned computers. It is indicated by a blue octagon in the bottom right-hand corner. If it finds a virus, Trendmicro will pop up with a message letting you know a virus has been found. The pop-up window will be labeled indicating it is part of Trendmicro. Unfortunately it will not detect any of the above mentioned counterfeit antivirus programs until after they have been installed. Unfortunately Trendmicro, as well as other antivirus programs, are unable to clean these after they have been installed.

If you happen to get one of these counterfeit programs installed please contact the Helpdesk. These are very hard to remove and if they caught soon enough there is a better chance of being able to get them cleaned off.

Instruction on how to close the program

Press CTRL-ALT-DEL

Click on the process that is running the popup

Select “End Task”

1 comment:

Jon Woltz said...

Library employees can call the Systems Office at 7074 or 7061 for help if your PC has been infected by one of these programs.

I've had good luck removing these programs with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (http://www.malwarebytes.org/). It's free.

Jon W.