East Bay / Tri-Valley PC Repair » viruses http://eastbaypcrepair.com Keeping Your Computer Healthy. Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:59:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Get Rid of those Fake Antivirus programs with Remove Fake Antivirus http://eastbaypcrepair.com/downloads/get-rid-of-those-fake-antivirus-programs-with-remove-fake-antivirus/ http://eastbaypcrepair.com/downloads/get-rid-of-those-fake-antivirus-programs-with-remove-fake-antivirus/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:54:47 +0000 Dave Bonds http://eastbaypcrepair.com/?p=315 Remove Fake Antivirus
If you work on computers, you’ve undoubtedly encountered a rogue anti-virus program. These programs disguise themselves as real antivirus programs, trick the user into installing them, and claim the user has viruses all over their system. Often times, the only virus is the rogue antivirus program itself. These programs can be trojans, viruses, or just an attempt to get the user to pay money by claiming it will get rid of the (non-existent) viruses on your system.. and doing nothing.

The problem is, these Fake antivirus programs can be a real pain to get rid of completely. That’s where Remove Fake Antivirus comes in.

Remove Fake Antivirus 1.32 is used to remove:

  • 1. Cyber Security
  • 2. Alpha Antivirus
  • 3. Braviax
  • 4. Windows Police Pro
  • 5. Antivirus Pro 2010
  • 6. PC Antispyware 2010
  • 7. FraudTool.MalwareProtector.d
  • 8. Winshield2009.com
  • 9. Green AV
  • 10. Windows Protection Suite
  • 11. Total Security 2009
  • 12. Windows System Suite
  • 13. Antivirus BEST
  • 14. System Security
  • 15. Personal Antivirus
  • 16. System Security 2009
  • 17. Malware Doctor
  • 18. Antivirus System Pro
  • 19. WinPC Defender
  • 20. Anti-Virus-1
  • 21. Spyware Guard 2008
  • 22. System Guard 2009
  • 23. Antivirus 2009
  • 24. Antivirus 2010
  • 25. Antivirus Pro 2009
  • 26. Antivirus 360 and
  • 27. MS Antispyware 2009

The program seems to be updated fairly regularly by the software developer, which is good because new rogue antivirus programs are released all the time, and hopefully will be added to future versions.

It is available for download from the developer’s site, where you’ll also find other useful utilities to protect your system.

[via ghacks]

]]> http://eastbaypcrepair.com/downloads/get-rid-of-those-fake-antivirus-programs-with-remove-fake-antivirus/feed/ 2 Microsoft’s Security Essentials : 1.5 Million Installs in One Week. Is it the End for Norton? http://eastbaypcrepair.com/downloads/microsofts-security-essentials-1-5-million-installs-in-one-week-is-it-the-end-for-norton/ http://eastbaypcrepair.com/downloads/microsofts-security-essentials-1-5-million-installs-in-one-week-is-it-the-end-for-norton/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:11:25 +0000 Dave Bonds http://eastbaypcrepair.com/?p=307 Microsoft Security Essentials
How many of you knew that Microsoft released a free anti-virus and anti-malware program this week? I’m guessing not too many.

A friend of mine, Luy, with IT Support Guys, wrote an excellent blog post on how Microsoft has failed to promote their new security app, even on their own search engine Bing.

Well, it’s called Microsoft Security Essentials and it’s available for download from Microsoft. I’ve installed it on several customer computers and have been rather happy with it. I just got around to installing it on a machine of mine, however, because I keep my system from getting infected in the first place, my machine is not really a good testing environment. But I digress…

The stats coming from Lee Matthews at Download Squad:

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog has posted some interesting numbers. After its first week, Security Essentials has already been installed more than 1.5 million times. From the approximately 535,000 machines reporting statistics, MSE has logged over 4 million detections.

44% of MSE users are already running Windows 7 with XP following at 33% and the remaining 23% on Vista. The number of detections per OS is also interesting. 52% of the 4 million reported were found on Windows XP systems compared to only 32% on Vista.

Windows 7 users fared even better. Though they represent the largest group of MSE users, only 16% of detections came from systems running Microsoft’s latest OS. The post also reports 1/3 of these machines are using the 64-bit version, which “is even more resistant to malware than 32-bit due to PatchGuard,” states Microsoft’s Joe Faulhaber.

Surprising that over half of the detections come from only 33% of users? Not really.

Go download and try out Microsoft Security Essentials yourself, and let me know in the comments how you like it? Is it better than the paid apps (like Norton or McAfee), or existing free anti-virus (like AVG or Avira)?

]]> http://eastbaypcrepair.com/downloads/microsofts-security-essentials-1-5-million-installs-in-one-week-is-it-the-end-for-norton/feed/ 2 PC’s Infected with Malware Up 15 Percent In September http://eastbaypcrepair.com/pc-repair/pcs-infected-with-malware-up-15-percent-in-september/ http://eastbaypcrepair.com/pc-repair/pcs-infected-with-malware-up-15-percent-in-september/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:23:47 +0000 Dave Bonds http://eastbaypcrepair.com/?p=285 From a report released by Panda Security, makers of Panda Antivirus, the number of PC’s infected with Malware grew 15 percent in the month of September. The numbers are just staggering, showing why you need an up-to-date antivirus AND an anti-malware program installed.

Credit: Panda Security

Credit: Panda Security


As you can see from the line graph, the US is just 9th on the list of most infected, with nearly 59 percent of all PC’s infected with malware.

And the following pie chart shows a breakdown of the number and types of those malware infections.

Credit: Panda Security

Credit: Panda Security

via CNET News via Panda Security

]]> http://eastbaypcrepair.com/pc-repair/pcs-infected-with-malware-up-15-percent-in-september/feed/ 0 MalwareBytes Anti-Malware Won’t Run? Here’s How To Fix It http://eastbaypcrepair.com/pc-repair/malwarebytes-anti-malware-wont-run-heres-how-to-fix-it/ http://eastbaypcrepair.com/pc-repair/malwarebytes-anti-malware-wont-run-heres-how-to-fix-it/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:28:49 +0000 Dave Bonds http://eastbaypcrepair.com/?p=153 MalwareBytes-Anti-Malware-Logo[1]
I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep your anti-virus software up to date, and also use an anti-malware program such as MalwareBytes Anti-Malware. These two programs work together in tandem simply because your anti-virus program won’t detect some “malware” programs, as they are not technically viruses, just malicious software.

Often times these programs disguise themselves as anti-virus programs, I’ve had numerous calls about exactly this type of problem just in the last several weeks. Some of the names of these “Rogue” Anti-virus programs are: Antivirus 2009, Personal Antivirus and many more are listed on Wikipedia: Rogue security software

Usually, I’ve found that I can simply run MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (MBAM), UPDATE! then run a scan, and it will detect the problem and is able to remove them. However this latest one, Personal Antivirus 2009 (PAV09), was quite a headache and took a while before I could even do anything to remove it. The program would not allow me to install MBAM, so I rebooted to safe mode, however, this program had installed some hook into the OS that prevented me from installing even in safe mode. Stuck.

So, after some Google searching, I found this on BleepingComputer, it suggested to change the name of the .exe to something completely unrelated. It worked. Awesome. Of course, the .exe of the program itself needed to be changed as well. So I changed it to a random string of letters.exe. And it STILL wouldn’t work!

Apparently, this malware is detecting a certain runtime or signature of the executable and immediately killing it, regardless of the name. After a few minutes of thinking, I decided to try an experiment, right click on the exe file (now renamed), and click the “Compatibility” tab, and under compatibility mode (this was Windows XP, but should work in XP or newer) select to “Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows 2000″. And…

It worked!

So, I guess I outsmarted the malware by tricking MBAM into thinking it was running under Windows 2000, making it undetectable by the malware program. And so, all said and done, MBAM was finally able to remove it, and the PC is working great. Hope this will help some other PC techs out there, when you don’t have the option to just wipe the drive and start fresh!

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