Personal AV (personal antivirus) and other fake AV’s
computer repair, Computer repair Richmond Virginia, News, Red Alert, richmond virginia, Security Alert August 30th, 2009Does this look familiar?
personal AV
If it does, then you or someone you know has likely been infected by a fake antivirus. We have seen a huge surge in infections of these fake AV’s over the past few weeks. We’ve posted about them before and they are still very nasty and constantly evolving. These fake AV’s infect your computer many different ways, one of the most common being peer to peer programs like limewire. However, once you’re infected they typically will try to get you to “register” their product in order to clean your computer of whatever viruses it says you have. The problem is that it is the virus and those viruses it says you have, you don’t. It simply wants to hold your computer hostage for ~$50. But whatever you do, don’t pay! You’ll likely have your credit card number stolen and used on other purchases.
These fake AV’s are known to cause all kinds of problems, starting with killing your real antivirus and then slowing your computer to a crawl and in many cases disabling the internet followed by computer death (failure to boot). If you see a screen like the one above of one similar (remember, there are tons of different variations of these fake AV’s) call us right away. The longer you wait the more damage it will usually do to your system.
Not only can we help clean your system, we can educate you and give you the tools so this hopefully won’t happen again.
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January 19th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
[...] Moreover, social media like facebook are one of the most common ways to get infected with a fake antivirus like we’ve warned about [...]
January 29th, 2010 at 1:50 am
[...] by evildoers everywhere. We have seen too many customers lately that have been infected by those nasty fake anti-viruses we are trying to help them keep it from happening again. The first step is to get an antivirus if [...]
March 21st, 2010 at 11:49 pm
[...] was a hostile site that would try and infect you with a fake antivirus. We’ve of course talked about these nasty things before and service computers with them all the time. This is just another prime example of how these [...]
January 5th, 2011 at 9:01 pm
[...] recently required viral cleaning assistance after her computer became infected with a dreaded rouge fake antivirus. We had helped her with a similar infection about a year before. At that time, we encouraged her to [...]