Scareware recovery: How to manually restore your malware infested PC
Posted on | October 20, 2009 | add a comment
This sound familiar? You cannot stop scans that pop up on your screen and warn you that your PC is infested with viruses. This is followed by insistent pitches to pay $30 to $100 for a cleanup service and ongoing protection.
So sorry. Your PC is infested with scareware. See this report about how scareware purveyors are resorting to blackmail to get you to pay for worthless antivirus protection — and botting your PC along the way.
What can you do? Sunbelt Software is providing a nifty free tool you can use to restore your PC to working order.
Go to this link. Print out the step-by-step instructions for Sunbelt’s VIPRE PC Rescue Program. Keep these instructions handy. If your computer becomes so infected that it won’t run, power down, then boot back up in safe mode. Then follow the instructions.
“It may not completely clean up the PC, but it should give you access to your PC so can start using other tools,” says Eric Howes, Sunbelt’s Director of Research Services.
Most scareware infections now routinely lock out access to antivirus defenses and cleanup tools. Once you get back up and running with VIPRE Rescue, you should be able to run clean-up tools that come with your paid antivirus suite, or free ones, like Spybot Search & Destroy and Malwarebytes. It’s a good idea, once you’re back up and running, to use both, as one may catch something the other doesn’t.
VIPRE Rescue is the type of tool a Geek Squad technician might use; previously it was out of the reach of the average consumer. But Sunbelt is making available pro-bono to one and all.
“The scareware scams out there are so devious and malicious, and the effects on PCs are so drastic that we felt that consumers really needed this kind of powerful program to deal with these nasty infections, which can take the entire PC hostage,” says Howes. “You really need to do an end-around the malware.”
And from now on, if you see an offer for a fake scan like the one above, or any pop-up that might be scareware, do not click on anything — not even “cancel.” This will only take you deeper. Instead, hit ctrl-alt-delete to open your task manager. Check the applications tab and seek out the scanning program. Click “end task” to force quit the program. If you have any doubts, force quit all of your applications and shut down.”
I recently had to do this when I too-quickly clicked a link on a Google search result without checking it closely, triggering a scareware scan. Force quitting worked.
Be careful out there.
By Byron Acohido
