Malware gremlin

We contracted a nice virus on our computer last week. I'll give credit to the gremlin. This window would randomly pop up from time to time threatening all kinds of damnation if we didn't click the ok button to download their conveniently available anti-virus software to rid us of this maliciousness.

It effectively crashed IE and Firefox, disabled our TrendMicro anti-virus software and froze up other programs so we couldn't use the computer before rebooting.

Notice that the window looks like the screen you would normally see when you open up "My Computer" but it's really the Internet Explorer window that is made to look the My Computer screen with a bunch of bogus warnings on it.



Clever little bugger. But not clever enough.

So much for TrendMicro.... it not only didn't catch it to start with but it failed to get rid of it once it was there. I guess you get what you pay for because I didn't pay for TrendMicro, I got it free from a RealPlayer promo.

So, I uninstalled TrendMicro and installed Norton Internet Security 2009 which within minutes immediately found the problem and erradicated it, all on it's own. I didn't even have to tell it to search, it just automatically detected it and deleted it. I was impressed.

So that's my little plug for symantec.