Posted on 01/30/2010 10:19:14 AM PST by dr_lew
There’s a particularly nasty virus making the rounds right now. It’s informally known as the Antivirus Live virus, as it bombards your PC with scary, real-looking security warnings and masquerades as a program — Antivirus Live (pictured) — that can protect and repair your system.
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The comments at How To Geek report variable success using Safe Mode to do this. I found these comments to be very helpful in making a judgement how to proceed. I couldn't even boot in Safe Mode using the F8 key, as recommended. I just got a blank black screen. So I tried the normal boot and kill procedure that I read of there, and this worked great for me.
Bookmarking for future reference if needed! Thanks
When someone is determined to have created and released malware or virii like this into the wild, they really should face life in prison without parole.
So far I’ve managed to avoid any truly nasty infections, but even the lesser ones I’ve dealt with have left me wanting to cause grievous bodily harm to the scum who wrote it.
ping
My wifes computer caught this and it was a nightmare. finally I booted up in safe mode and was able to run system restore. Then I ran a complete virus/malware scan. That got rid of it.
I have Windows XP, which has a pretty good Task Manager. I just hit ctrl-alt-del as soon as possible, selected the task manager, scrolled down to highlight XXXXsysguard.exe, and selected "End process". I think I may have had to do it twice. It's a race against time, so be sure to stay cool, calm, and collected as you fumble around :-)
When I put the thumbdrive in, with the SUPERAntiSpyware on it, I used Windows Explorer ( not Internet Explorer! ) to run it, and as I said, it seemed to go very smoothly from there, ( not forgetting about unsetting "Proxy Server" in IE! )
I think my Safe Mode boot problems may have been because I put the thumbdrive in before the boot. It may look there for a boot image, or something.
I just got my computer back from the shop after getting this nasty thing.
Tried to shut down but wasn’t fast enough.
What a mess!
Thought my McAfee would have stopped it - it didn’t.
Take frequent incremental backups.
Oy Vey! Don't ask me about the lurid visions I was having already, Dr. Zoidberg!
I was wondering too, why there seems to be so little interest or discussion about the source and history of this thing, ( which is just the thing of the moment, I guess. It's an ongoing issue. ) I did notice that one of the counterfeit pop-up warnings had some very interesting grammatical irregularities. I jotted down, "Click here for the scan of you computer."
My tin hat is tingling off my head.
Another post that reminds me of how glad I am that I switched to Apple computers after 20+ years of putting up with Windoze. I have an online/all the time connection. In more than a year and a half of heavy internet use I’ve never had a virus, worm, or annoying malware. Now that you can run Windows programs under the MacOS as well as they run on a PC there’s no reason not to switch. No.. I don’t work for Steve Jobs. But, I think I spent a lot of time working for Norton, McAffey, AVG, and etc..
I solved this problem about 3.5 years ago. I bought the wife a Mac and used Ubuntu on my computer.
The iMac I bought for her works as well today as it did that day I bought it in 2006. Actually it works better with Snow Leopard on it.
I know all the arguments people make about Mac—too expensive, etc. But we simply haven’t had to spend a penny on anti-virus, nor a minute of time on removing viruses.
And I don’t see the need to replace that computer for years to come.
In the end, I would rather enjoy a worry free computing experience instead of all the stuff I see on this post.
I got that thing some days ago and my AVAST started yelling. I X-ed out and did a anti virus run and have been fine.
Life on an island with no access to modern (post 1900) technology.
Amen...running Linux Mint here....but I do have a laptop which has one job....Turbotax...
My computer was nailed by this 3 days ago. I took it to the pros and they cleaned it up for $70. Everything I tried didn’t work, including running the malwarebytes program. I’ll try this if it happens again.
I already had malwarebytes installed, but it couldn’t touch this new iteration. It blocked malwarebytes from working to isolate the virus.
That would work, as long as it were a rather desolate place where you had to work from before sun up to well after sun down for just basic survival.
And at that, I’d still want them to be flogged weekly for the duration of their existence.
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