I like to imagine I’m on the cutting edge (…oh be quiet and let me dream will you?) So I was quite pleased when I got buzzed the other day at work and our V.P says "Hey - would you like to see a cool virus?" And of course my answer took less than a split second "Sure!"

Follow up:

So I run over to Jane Doe’s desk (names changed to protect the somewhat innocent) and V.P. says take a look at this! It’s Windows Antivirus 2008. Ho hum….been there done that…"Seen it already." (Just a week ago someone else I know was struggling to clean that little beauty up.) V.P. just looked at me in amazement. Apparently this has only been around for a couple of weeks. So there you go - I’m on the cutting edge - of what I’m just not sure.

V.P. guy is a "trying to forget he used to be a techno geek" kinda guy. He’d already done the Google and read the Bleeping Computer article on this new virus. And it is a beauty I might add. It’s actually a trojan of the bsod variety. Not only do you get incessant pop-ups about the hundreds and hundreds of viruses you must "click here right now" to fix, but you get a BSOD (blue screen of death) periodically that’s actually not a real BSOD (and just goes away if you click escape) designed to frighten you even more. And if that weren’t enough….one out of every two or three tries and you can’t even connect to Google! It totally hijacks your browser. Oh yes, and it drops about a dozen icky nasty processes on your machine and when you shut down one another starts. Ah, it reminds me of the good old Smitfraud days…

My purpose here is two-fold. I want you to be aware of this very nasty little nasty going around, and how to fix it easily. And to give my opinion on the antispyware program that makes fixing it ever so easy. I’ve now installed it on several machines and I’ve been rather impressed with this new addition to my clean-up routine.

Malwarebytes did a fine job of handling Windows Antivirus 2008 (which by the way is in no way related to Windows. When I ran it on the desktop at home it found a number of oddities none of my other programs found. I was a bit dubious, so I spent some quality Google time, and found it was dead on. It found things like wallpaper hijackers that I’d not even heard of before (but explains why when desktop icons were moved around they wouldn’t save the new location on reboot). After verifying over half of the things it found, I went on blind faith and cleaned them all up - and the machine is certainly opening several programs better than it has in awhile!

Now, you didn’t expect me to make an installation tutorial for you did you? Really, you should know better than that by now. The installation and update is really very painless, but if you must see the instructions before doing it you can find them on Help2Go or Bleeping Computer. The Bleeping Computer site also includes information on Windows Antivirus 2008 and other manual removal methods if you should become infected.

In conclusion, I’d like to thank my mom, the academy - oops wrong conclusion…well how about just give Malwarebytes a try and see if it finds anything on your machine the other antispyware programs have missed. I mean really, what harm can it do? If it finds nothing, kudos to you, pat yourself on the back for a clean machine. If it finds anything, you can rest easy tonight knowing your machine is safer and cleaner than ever. You do stay awake at night worrying about that don’t you? Everyone does right? It can’t be just me…..