Virus Hoaxers Want Your Money

This month I will concentrate on some of the virus hoaxers currently circulating on the internet and how to identify them. This has become an increasing problem and recently I have come across several people who handed over their hard earned money to these scam artists. Worse still it is likely if you do this your credit card or bank will not reimburse you the transaction and you will be at a total loss of the money.

Virus Hoaxers
The two primary hoaxers of late are “internet Security 2010” and “Anti-virus Live!”. Both of these hoaxers use a stealth method to infect your computer and once installed will start displaying messages that your system is severely infected with viruses and Trojans. The pc becomes unusable as no matter what program you try to run you are told it is infected. You are then offered an option to pay for the full version of the product – Don’t!

Removing The Infection
The bad news here is that unless you have the correct skill and know how to track the infection down it is highly unlikely you will be unable to get these programs off your computer. The infection roots itself at the core of your operating system. Wiping the computer and starting over works but many people have neither the skill nor the original setup cd so this is not an option. My recommendation is to shutdown your computer and get it cleaned professionally. Professionally means your next door neighbour or your nephew studying computer science are not candidates for the job. Neither, by the way, are the cowboy computer repair operators who have sprung up of late. I am eternally grateful for the work I receive as a result of their unskilled attempts to fix computer systems.

Hoax Defence And Recovery
I recommend a five stage security approach to defence and recovery of your computer consisting of : restricting access to your computer, a solid backup strategy, proven and reliable anti-virus software , a safe browser and careful browsing practices.
Restricting Access To Your Computer
Anyone who uses your computer has the ability to infect it with spyware and viruses and this is often the case with machines I see on the bench. Here are a couple of easy steps to reduce the risk of infection by people using your machine.

• Don’t allow anyone to use your computer but yourself and this includes allowing them to give you movies or music they have.

• If you must allow someone to use the machine activate the guest account and let them use this account only. This is not 100% foolproof against infection but it does reduce the chances somewhat

• Do not have multiple users on the computer. It is not uncommon for me to see five and six users on the same machine. Multiple users are a bad idea - don’t do it.