Personal Antivirus is the latest in a string of deceitful malware infections & is certainly not a program you want to have on your Computer. It is a fake tool designed to deceive you into paying for its registered commercial version (a worthless fake AntiVirus software). The deception involves pop-up warnings and various system notifications all of which warn you of various infections on your computer. All of these warnings are fake.
Personal Antivirus will cause many different kinds of negative behaviour on your computer and will result in a dramatic system slowdown.
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.Various warnings will pop-up, warning you to purchase the Personal Antivirus software. These are carefully designed to impersonate genuine Windows Secuirty Center dialog boxes.
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.You might notice unusual shortcuts on your desktop that were not there before.
5.Personal Antivirus attempts to make your browser divert to strange sponsored listings instead of genuine webpages.
Personal Antivirus should be removed immediately from your computer. Follow the removal guide below and you won’t break into a sweat! Personal Antivirus is a resistant virus. It won’t just leave your computer if you ask it to (through the normal uninstall process in Add/Remove Programs). Manual removal is a challenge since the infection builds its new home in many different locations on your hard drive. Unless you are very experienced at virus removal, it is likely that you will leave some of the associated files and registry keys behind that will reinstall the infection at a later date (‘reinfectors’). Bearing all of this in mind, for the vast majority of computer users, an automatic removal tool will be the best option. Malwarebytes is a very effective and trusted malware removal program. Download and install the free version of this software. Run the ‘Quick Scan’. This will only take about 10 minutes or so & will automatically remove the Personal Antivirus infection. It is likely that if Personal AntiVirus was on your computer, other infections will have crept in as well. It would be wise to follow up the Malwarebytes scan with a full scan using your own existing AntiVirus software.
Prevent Future Infections
1.Update all of your software. Update Windows, update Java, update Flash player! In fact update any & all software that you use. Old software often has inherent security vulnerabilities/weaknesses and these are regularly exploited by virus authors to infect your machine. Don’t give the bad guys this chance. Update now!
2.Get some decent Antivirus and AntiSpyware software installed. The free alternatives are struggling to fight against these new stronger viruses.
3.Finally, if you use p2p software, ease off or stop altogether. In pracatice, a large proprotion of viruses are downloaded from the file sharing networks.
Personal Antivirus is a good example of a new generation of virus infections that don’t choose to hide deep in your system, but instead come out in the open and try and scare the computer user into spending money on a fake removal tool. Malwarebytes will remove this infection quite easily and won’t cost you a penny, however you should follow this up with a more indepth virus scan and take preventative steps to avoid further similar infections!
For more detailed advice on the Personal Antivirus infection at http://www.personalantivirus.org.uk
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Mon, Oct 12, 2009
Spyware