Sometimes, my job takes me to some very strange places on the Internet. I read all sorts of stories, some true, some bogus. I visit many websites, some safe, some dangerous.
Tonight, while researching the “hackability” of a popular program used in many public schools, I visited a dangerous website where I almost got tagged with the same virus that I had just spent hours prying out of two different customer’s computers. I’ll tell you how I avoided getting infected, but first, a little background material.
In October of last year, I wrote an article titled, “Antivirus is not enough.” It explained how that, despite great advances in computer technology, there is no antivirus program in the world that can completely protect a computer 100% against user stupidity. It simply doesn’t exist.
The bad guys are very smart guys, and they think up new and innovative ways to mess up people’s computers every day. Simply installing a “set it and forget it” antivirus program tacked on top of a firewall will not protect you against their nefarious schemes. If you want to enjoy a safe computing experience, you are going to have to change your behavior. If you want to keep your computer off of the repair bench, you may need to stop doing some things that you’ve been thoughtlessly doing for years.
The main thing that most folks need to stop doing is installing programs and applications that they download from unknown sources on the Internet. Most viruses these days don’t come from email attachments; they come from websites. Just because someone writes a convincing blurb on some website about how great something is does not mean that you should do what they say.
The worst examples of this that I’ve seen lately are the thousands of innocent-looking websites that, as soon as you land on their page, an “alert” starts flashing obnoxiously. This important-looking alert says that a virus has been detected on your computer, and to “click here” to fix the problem. As soon as you “click there,” your computer is infected with a nasty piece of virus-like software called WinAntivirus that constantly annoys you with popups. Most antivirus programs have a hard time dealing with this problem.
That’s the exact problem that I had this evening, although I was confronted with a WinAntivirus (WAV) variant called “PersonalAntivirus (PAV).” There are many different flavors of WAV floating around the Internet, including PAV, PestCapture, WinDefender, SystemDoctor, Ultimate Defender, XPAntivirus and others.
As soon as I saw the scary-looking alert pop up telling me that my computer had been infected, I knew that I was in the wrong place. I also knew what not to do. Remember what I’m about to tell you and you, too, can avoid disaster. If you ever see an alert like the one that I’ve described, and it is not coming from your real antivirus program, do not click “OK.” Do not click “Fix.” Do not click “Cancel.” Do not click the “X” to close the alert. Do not click anything in the alert. Doing any of these things will infect your computer. You need to close the fake alert and your browser using emergency methods.
To brutally force the closing of the alert and your browser, and, indeed, any Windows program that may be running, you need to use Window’s built-in Task Manager utility. Do this by pressing the Control, Alternate and Delete keys, all at the same time. Most keyboards show these as Ctrl, Alt and Del. Pressing these keys simultaneously will open the Task Manager, where you can terminate certain Windows tasks. At the top, you will see a tab called Applications. Select this tab and you will see the name of the Web page that contains the phony alert, and your browser icon next to the page. Highlight this item, and then click the End Task button. The browser will close and the fake alert will go away.
You’re not completely out of the soup, yet, though. Because you have performed a forced shutdown of your browser, the pesky fake alert probably still lives in your browser’s cache file, which is sort of like your browser’s memory. This means that as soon as you start up your browser again, the fake alert mess may start all over again, too. That’s what was happening in my situation. What you need is a simple, direct way to clean out your browser’s cache.
For this final cleanup chore, I chose a free program called Ccleaner (ccleaner.com). I install Ccleaner on most every computer that I touch. Simply run the “Cleaner” function of Ccleaner and it will dump your browser’s cache. Problem solved. Your computer has been saved from disaster and an expensive repair bill!