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"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin
If automated removal fails, you may have to roll up your sleeve and attempt to manually remove the scareware from your system. This isn’t a straight forward process, and will vary depending on what kind of scareware and malware program(s) have been installed. However, if you know what has infected your computer, various tutorials are available online, at Websites and user forums like bleepingcomputer.com.
Fortunately for you, there are both free and premium tools available online that will detect and remove rogue antivirus and scareware programs. Kaspersky Lab (which owns Threatpost) offers the free Kaspersky Removal Tool for this purpose. Others are Hijackthis from Trend Micro, MBAM, offered by bleepingcomputer.com and so on. If you were running antivirus software, that was disabled by the scareware, try reinstalling it on the infected system using the installation disk.
Don’t Pay! Whatever else you do not pay to “license” the scareware, says Brulez. Scareware and fake antivirus programs are malicious and are created and distributed by criminal organizations. Paying the licensing fee may temporarily free up your system and remove the fake warnings and alerts generated by the program, but it will only be a matter of time before the folks behind the scam will be back for another swipe at your wallet.
The first step in dealing with a scareware is to understand what has just happened to your computer. Victims often ignore or miss the signs of a rogue AV infection, says Nicolas Brulez, a senior malware researcher at Kaspersky Lab. This is especially true with scareware, which tries to fool you into believing that it is a legitimate program trying to help you with a virus infection. Understand that, while you haven’t been infected with the viruses you’re being warned about, you have been infected with scareware.
Scareware is one of the most pernicious online threats. For those who have been infected, it is also one of the hardest to forget. Rogue antivirus software and other forms of scareware hold victims hostage: shutting off access to their desktop and most of the Internet, disabling security software and preventing them from removing the malicious program. Behind the scenes, scareware often installs other malicious programs, like Trojan horse and bot software. If you’re unlucky enough to get infected with one of these bad boys, what can you do to remove it?
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise, according to a report released by Trustwave this week.
Today’s image of the day comes from a video posted by New Scientist magazine that helps illustrate an attack between a server and a hacker.Created by Ben Reardon of Dataviz Australia, the video chronicles a hacker’s attempt to break into a voice over IP (VoIP) server. As we’ve seen, servers like these can be prime targets for hackers via denial of service (DoS) attacks and scans like the one visualized here. In this case, the outcome was a good one: the attack was thwarted by security software.
Rogue
anti virus software companies have decided to “reach out and touch
someone,” according to a new report from Krebsonsecurity.com.
Internet crime is on the rise again according to a report recently released by The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The organization said last week that it received the second-highest number of complaints in its decade long history in 2010.
China, once one of the worlds’s leading spam-producers, is at long last beginning to curb its spam output. Cisco Systems’ IronPort group ranks the nation 18th on its list of spam-producing countries, according to this piece from the IDG News Service.
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