Moe’s B2B World

The commonest kind of malware threat in widespread circulation on the internet toady are the rogue antivirus programs. Personal Antivirus is the latest of these rogue infections which are fake tools designed to frighten the computer user into buying another full version of the software. This infection attempts to decieve the PC user by displaying fake warnings and notifications warning of various infections that actually dont exist.

This rogue software will attack your computer with various unwanted and undesirable behaviours. These significantly decrease the speed of your system.

1.Personal Antivirus contains keylogging functionality which copies all of the things that you type into your keyboard and makes this information available to the nasty authors of this virus. As you can imagine, this raw data can be used to breach your privacy and steal from you.

2.A Window and/or a system alert will appear impersonating Windows Security Center stating that you should purchase Personal Antivirus.

3.Frequent fake warnings will appear warning of other security problems on your computer. These make it difficult to get on with your own work as they reappear and are highly persistent. You should not interact with these messages as they are designed to bring you to a purchase page or download more infections.

4.Changed or new Icons & Shortcuts might appear on your Desktop.

5.Personal Antivirus attempts to make your browser divert to strange sponsored listings instead of genuine webpages.

Without doubt, Personal Antivirus should be removed from your computer as quickly as possible. Unless you are well experienced with manual virus removal, use an automatic tool. Malwarebytes is quite effective at gettting rid of this infection, (but there are others as well like Spyware Doctor). Install the free version & run the ‘quick scan’. This will remove the Personal Antivirus infection but there is a chance that other infections will be there as well. It would be wise to continue with a full scan of your computer using your own AntiVirus software.

There are many ways to reduce the risk of this kind of thing happening again. Rather than describe them all, here are my top 3 tips:

1. Keep your version of Windows up to date. Make sure that Automatic Updates is enabled on your computer and is scheduled for a realistic time when you are likely to be online. Dont forget to update other software to prevent hackers exploiting old versions.

2. Strengthen your PCs Antivirus software. This is your main defence against infections so choose wisely. Most of the free antivirus software are struggling to provide effective protection this year.

3. Be careful online. Some kinds of internet usage like pornagraphy, warez and p2p file sharing are inherently dangerous and will result in a greater chance of virus infection.

Personal Antivirus should be removed immediately from your computer. This should be followed up with further full virus scans and preventative measures need to be taken to prevent further infections. If you got infected once, your computer is not as secure as it could be.

For more detailed advice on the Personal Antivirus infection at http://www.personalantivirus.org.uk

Want to find out more about Personal Antivirus, then visit Bob Williams’s site on Personal Antivirus Removal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 2:16 am and is filed under Internet.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.