My Biggest Computer Pet Peeve Of The Moment

I generally enjoy computers.  I enjoy building them, I enjoy upgrading them and I enjoy using them.  I enjoy doing research on any topic on the Internets, Interwebs and Information Super Highway.  I spend hours looking up mindless trivia as well as tips and pointers on anything from replacing the agitator on your washing machine to tiling a shower in your bathroom to replacing the door handle on your Toyota mini-van to playing the riff to Led Zeppelin's The Ocean.

All this is fine and good but I am starting to see a disturbing trend in doing harm to unsuspecting folks PCs in the form of the Fake Anti-Virus Scan Pop-up or as it is known in tech circles, Scareware.  What these pop-ups really do to the unsuspecting user is install harmful programs on their PCs that disable legitimate security software and render the PC unusable, steal their personal info and other bad things.

My daughter was looking into the Paul is Dead rumor.  As she looked it up, she hit a page that told her taht her PC was infected with a virus and should it scan her PC for free.  She was stuck at that point because when she tried to get off the page, it popped up a dialog that gives a Yes, Scan or Cancel option.  She couldn't get out of it and unknowingly installed Enterpise Suite of some crapware.  I tried to run the Anti-Virus but it disabled it and caused an error when I tried to fix the problem.  I couldn't run IE or Firefox without erroring out when I tried to download Revo Uninstaller.  Revo will do a deep uninstall and remove any trace of a program from the registry.

So I was stuck.  I decided to go into Windows Help and Support and revert back to teh last Restore point.  Fortunately, the last restore point was last night at midnight.  I was able to get the traces of this crapware out of teh registry.  I then re-downloaded McAfee from AT&T and am in the process of a deep anti-virus scan.

And the occurrence of this Scareware is on the rise.  So be careful.  If one of these programs trys to get you, close the browser right way.  Do not click on any buttons and by all means, do not run the scan.  The sad thing is this happens to someone as technical as me.  How does someone who doesn't know their GPU from their SATA survive?

The irony of this story is I have a copy of Windows 7 ready to install on their PC.  Windows 7 has security setting that prevent users from installing anything on the PC.  That would have avoided this mess.  I guess I know what I'll be doing next weekend.