Real Antivirus

January 6, 2009

What a pain in the rear! I somehow got infected with the Real Antivirus or RealAV. It’s a rogue software that infects your computer and causes all kinds of problems. It kept displaying that my computer was infected with multiple trojans and viruses and I needed to get Real Antivirus to clear them up. It opened my FireFox window to it’s own website over and over taunting me to purchase their software to clear up my problem. At least I was smart enough to not do that! This RealAV thing got past my Norton. I ended up taking Norton off my computer and downloading McAfee in attempts to get rid of the problems. McAfee found no problems also. That’s the problem with software like that. They are able to detect known viruses. I guess mine was unknown. So after several attempts to get my laptop back to working condition, it kept getting worse. My desktop background turned black and flashed a fake (well not really fake since I was infected!) warning about needing software to remove the trojans and viruses. My documents folder would mysteriously open all the time. I couldn’t access my Task Manager…the list goes on! So I tried to run my Ad-Adare program. It was locked up also. This is one sneaky program! So as my frustration grew, I handed the computer to Jon when he got home from work. He attempted to restore my Windows to a previous date, one what was before the infection. That didn’t work either. This thing was everywhere!! After about an hour or so, Jon decided this was above ours skills and we needed to take my laptop to the repair shop. I can’t stand to take my computer in to be fixed. He also wouldn’t let me transfer my photos to anything else for fear that we would transfer the virus also. So I always get that panicked feeling when I know my computer is going in and I may lose everything on it. It’s been a few months since I backed up my files on our portable hard drive, and I didn’t want to risk losing anything! So, the determined gal that I am, I decided this virus wasn’t getting the best of me.

Why are there sick people out there that get their jollies off doing stuff like this? Apparently, this virus (besides being a pain on your computer!) attempts to get you to purchase software to remove itself from your computer. Sounds like a nice idea. Infect my computer and let me pay you to remove it. The real kicker is that it doesn’t remove the virus! It just steals your credit card information. So whatever you do, do not purchase their product!

Anyway, J told me if I got the computer fixed, he’d be very impressed. I told him to be prepared to be impressed! I don’t know when that man will realized that when this chicky gets something in her head, watch out! So I started on my journey to figure out how to remove the crap off my computer.

I eventually made my way to cnet.com. In the forums are some wonderful people! With their suggestions, I was able to remove RealAV from my laptop! So I am very grateful to the the folks on the cnet forums and especially Tarq57. If it weren’t for him, I’d still be dazed and confused about getting the stuff to work.

I learned that I needed to download Malwarebytes Anti-malware.  So I did that. It downloaded fine, but the virus wouldn’t let me use it. I ended up downloading Dr Web CureIt.  It cleared up enough stuff that I could then run the Malwarebytes. Now my computer is working again…except the internet.

So now I’m busy trying to figure out how I disabled the internet. If you have any idea about that one, please let me know!

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