Win 7 Antispyware 2012 & Vista Antivirus 2012 Explosion

By Evan Asher January 17th in Blog

We are currently being inundated with clients who have been infected with Win 7 Antispyware 2012 and Vista Antivirus 2012. This is the largest increase in infection rates we’ve seen in many months.

This rogue spyware masquerades as an anti-spyware program, ostensibly alerting you to an infection on your machine. Their goal is to capture your credit card information in exchange for removing the infection. This infection is distributed in one of two ways. Often it will disguise itself as an online virus scanner that detects a virus and then prompts you to download a program to remove it. The other way it is transmitted is via hacked websites.

Please note that legitimate websites can be hacked to distribute malicious software. Your infection may have come from a site you wouldn’t normally suspect. In addition, this infection is not distributed passively. Hackers are not targeting your computer and directly infecting it without any action from you. Therefore once the infection is cleared off, maintaining the same browsing behavior will likely reinfect you.

While we can clear off this infection, reducing the chance of future infections is always our end goal. To that end we suggest using an alternative browser like Firefox or Chrome. We also recommend the use of a free antivirus program such as Avast or Microsoft Security Essentials. All updates should be run, including browser and operating system updates. And finally, be careful about the sites that you choose to trust before you click on them. Once you’ve loaded a site, it may be too late.

Our technicians never get infections on their computers. They use only the methods outlined above, so we know they are effective. If you see the symptoms of infection, including pop-ups and virus warnings that look suspicious, please shut off your computer right away to prevent further infection. Usually when you see the symptoms of this infection, there are several other infections that are not showing pop-ups that must be removed as well.  Call us and we can come out to your location, or you can drop your computer off at our office where we offer same day turnaround.