Are computer viruses just a protection racket?

[reaganator]

I have persistant, official looking pop ups in a yellow box (system alert) that are now telling me my computer is infected with viruses.

This eventually leads to the cure, me paying them 49.95

Seems like an old time protection racket to me. Odd that as soon as my computer acquires these viruses the prompting of the anti-virus companies begin.

Any thoughts on this?

[Southerngl]

Ping for later download.

Thanks!

[waynesa98]

symantec has a program to remove the reg entries for their programs so you can reinstall. Its a free download, “norton_removal_tool.exe”

[SIDEWALKING]

I got Smitfraud into my system and it was a nightmare. I ended up wiping the HD and reloading Windows. All the “fixes”, both free and paid for were of no use.

I would strongly recommend never paying to remove viruses/spyware. A fairly easy to follow procedure for removing SmitFraud is here.

I know it's too late now, but that site has many, many other removal tuitorials, should you ever become infected again in the future.

[frankenMonkey]

My Dell got infected, and it's worthless. Can't be sure that all of the spyware (especially keyloggers) have been removed.

Got the new 3.06GHz iMac 24 incher yesterday - SWEET!

[brityank]

Good list, but it seems LavaSoft AdAware now requires you buy something, or at least pass your email/ID on to other sites. Guess I won't be using it anymore. :^(

[Roses0508]

The “yeah, but” here is that there isn’t much bang for the virus/hack/trojan whatever for MACs and MAC networks for the bad guys. However, a few weekends ago a whole bunch of MAC networks experienced an intrusion. As MAC gets more of the market, they too, will experience more of these issues. We can hope Apple has done a better job of construction on their OS, so there are fewer holes for hackers and the like. In truth, only time will tell.

MAC is a great home computer, not so great in business because there are always issues of compatibility, because the business world is so overwhelmingly Microsoft.

[JoJo Gunn]

Sounds like “Virus Heat” to me.

http://www.pchubs.com/blogs/virus-heat-removal-process-remove-virus-heat

[MarkL]

My Dell got infected, and it's worthless. Can't be sure that all of the spyware (especially keyloggers) have been removed.

The only way to be absolutely sure is to wipe the drive (do NOT just do a reinstall - Some malware can protect itself in certain areas of the disk that can't be "formatted clean") and do a fresh install. By wiping the drive, I mean using a debug script or something like killdisk.

Mark

[gopheraj]

to read later