Rogue anti-virus software – malware warning!

Last Updated on February 18, 2023

This is an email I sent to my clients in October 2009

I wouldn’t normally send out a message warning about a virus – as more often then not emails warning about viruses are more annoying and time consuming than viruses themselves – but there’s a real pickle of a virus doing the rounds at the moment that I wanted to warn you about.

I can’t give you the name of the rogue program in question as it changes name every few weeks, but I can describe the symptoms;

• Messages start popping up informing you that you have lots of viruses and spyware infections (the number will probably be 30+)
• An anti-virus program will keep asking you to register to clear aforementioned problems.

This is a very tough virus to repair, and in some instances we have had to do a complete software rebuild. We are not totally sure how infections are occurring, but as always do not open attachments from emails sent by unknown recipients. If in doubt do not open anything you are not expecting.

I would normally only expect to fix any given virus once, but I have now fixed this virus several times.

In the past this fake anti-virus software has called itself AntiVirus XP, AntiVirus 2009, Antivirus 2010, IE Antivirus and has used many more fairly legitimate sounding names.

For more information visit the ‘Rogue Security Software’ page on Wikipedia.org…