Bonza Mobile Computer Repairs

Fake Antivirus Software

There has been a massive increase in the amount of users getting infected by fraud antivirus programs that are floating around the internet. Over the past 3 years I have seen the rate of infection climb from every 1 in 10 machines that have viruses to 1 in 3 machines which seem to contract it.

What is a fraud antivirus?

A fraud antivirus is a legitimate looking antivirus program which may pop up while you are browsing or after you have had a downloading stint using various P2P software downloading programs (see my guide on limewire and p2p programs for more information on these). These fake programs are actually viruses themselves and they disable your current antivirus and in some cases allow more viruses into your PC. They can be particularly difficult to remove and can even remove important windows files from your PC in some extreme cases, claiming that these needed files are in fact viruses and removing them upon the users request. A lot of these programs will ask you for credit card details to ‘activate the software’ and allow it to remove the ‘infected’ files. Under no circumstances should you ever enter your details into these programs as they have been linked to bank fraud, which means you could wake up the next morning to an empty bank account. (more…)