More Ways To Prevent Rogue Programs From Getting On Your PC

Many fake antivirus programs will install themselves through something that looks completely legitimate but is far from it. Once a fake antivirus program installs itself, it begins to damage your system files and eventually destroys your copy of Windows. A few of the most common fake or “rogue” antivirus programs are:

Antivirus 2009 or Antivirus 2010 (or a variant of this)
Personal Security 2009
Personal Antivirus
System Security
System Doctor 2009

A more in-depth list is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_security_software

There are many ways to become infected. The most common is that someone will send you a link to what looks like a video, and in the middle of the black video window, you will see a message that you do not have the correct version of Flash Player. 99.9% of PC’s automatically have the correct version of Flash Player, so this is a sham. Don’t fall for it and don’t click on anything on the page. Instead, hit CTRL, ALT and DEL and then go to Processes. Find IEXPLORE.EXE and right-click on it, then do an END PROCESS.

This is the ONLY way to be sure that Internet Explorer is actually closing. If you try and “click off” the video page by clicking the red “X” in the upper-right corner, you will then see a small gray box that will state, “You may be infected…….etc.” You MUST hit CTRL, ALT and DEL at this time and do an END PROCESS on IEXPLORE.EXE (however many you find), or you will have the fake .EXE file installed on your PC.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of web sites on the Internet that have these fake programs set up on their Home pages, so that when you visit the site, you will inadvertently pull the file to your temporary internet files folder and it will begin installing itself.

Be safe and be watchful for these messages, and DON’T TRUST ANY “SCANNER” THAT YOU COME ACROSS ON THE INTERNET, especially if it seems to be for “free.” It’s more than likely that it will come attached with a big bill for cleaning your PC off in the very near future.