Windows 7: Introduction to Rogue Anti-Virus

Oh, those screenshots take me back to when I first encountered this type of threat. They were the most fun to clean off of client computers. A poor client said he suckered into this scam and entered his credit card to buy it. No clue if he ever got his money back or if he was a victim of id theft.

I think I even got one of those on one of my computers years ago. I think I had opened a website that was hacked.

Back then, I manually cleaned the malware off. Now, I use Malwarebytes.

Boot safe mode with network in 7, download malwarebytes and do a full scan. That will clean up the easy stuff. Then go to live.sysinternals.com and get
http://live.sysinternals.com/autoruns.exe and
http://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe
Examine each user in autoruns and delete suspicious entries. Then examine all processes in procexp. Use Verify Image Signatures for more info.

RKill and ComboFix are all you need to remove these little buggers. Google for ComboFix and you'll find both. I clean 4-5 machines per week.

Well,, be careful using ComboFix, there is a warning to using it, take head of it and back up your system prior to using it. It can and has blown up systems in the past.

But, when it works, it is great, and I am not saying don't try it, just be ready for the worst.

Jan, somehow I missed this thread. Thanks for posting it. It is good information.

Ah, rouge antivirus's. I had to give a speech on these at school last semester (speech classes are mandatory for my degree). The teacher was 50, hated computers, and most speeches about technology. I managed to get an A on that speech....

But enough about that. I take care of these for people all the time and when its not a dirt poor college student I'm doing it for, I charge about $30 bucks to do it. Great way to make some extra cash. I don't care for MalwareBytes and a lot of these rouge anti-viruses come with programming to prevent the instillation or running of it anyways. Since there are so many that know how to make it run even if this programming exist, I can usually find a list of files and registry entries online and remove everything manually via safe mode. I then install MSE or AVG and let that remove any part of it I missed. I only know one person that actually paid for the program and it definitely installed something like it said it would. Too bad the stuff it installed was a bunch of adware. Made it harder to get the job done but made me feel justified in charging $50.

Congratulations on the A. I would like to have heard the speech.

Not exactly a rogue "Anti-Virus", but definitely a rogue:

ZeuS Trojan Learns How to Spoof Credit Card Security Popups | Maximum PC

Thats definately something to watch out for profdlp. Thanks for the info.

So many of these "Rogue" (anti) Viruses include a Rootkit Rootkit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I won't even try to clean up a rootkit because the OS will remain unstable. This really requires a 'wipe' and "clean installation" of the Windows operating service.