Thread: I have a question about the fake virus scans that come up when browsing

Where exactly are they coming from? I went from yahooanswers to princeton.edu, none of which seem malicious (I hope not).

And besides this, what of all the other malware out there on the web? And what laws are there to crack down on this deception?

I advise you to install Malwarebytes, and Avast if you haven't already. These are two must haves these days, and are top of the line in the free category. I also find Avast to be better than Mcaffee and Norton. The alerts are indeed fake. i would run malwarebytes to check for any malicious registry keys, and cookies. Then setup Avast, this will help to protect your computer. Trust me i just had a trojan kill my previous OS. Avast has blocked quite a few bugs while i was indeed surfing threw yahoo and google. So it is very sensitive, and updates itself almost everyday. I don't know of any laws regarding virus' or malware, but i suppose there are some, although the net will always have means of circumvention.

Yeah, what he said. Superantispyware and SpyBotSearchandDestroy are also handy if those ones fail to be of any help for some strange reason.

Never EVER install Norton or McAfee, they are more intrusive that most of the viruses they protect against, and they don't protect against the worst ones because they are slow to update their definitions. Install AVG or eTrust. AVG is free, but very good, and eTrust costs money, but is lightweight and very good as well.

Those fake messages are malware though, not viruses, you need a different tool to remove them. Lavasoft is usually the best for this. Just never click on the fake offer, they may install viruses.

Yea, you've really gotta watch those. My antivirus catches them now, but I got that one before. I could tell mediately that it was fake, but even then it was too late to do anything about it - I immediately shut down IE and did a virus scan, but by the point the window popped up it was too late. Blocked IE and several other programs from running, I actually had to have the verizon tech support fix it (where they remotely operate your computer). Surprisingly that verizon Internet security suite has, with the exception of that, taken care of everything I've encountered so far.

As for norton and mcafee, mcafee never was that good, but unless I was mistaken at the time I recall norton being very good years ago. Was this not the case or did their quality just tale a nose-dive?

It's more of a fault of Microsoft. Windows has a huge amount of security holes and Norton expands to try and keep an eye on all of these holes. It's just become bloatware. They also release one version of their software, so even if you're running it on Windows XP, you've got all of the security features for Windows Vista, which was probably the biggest security flop in computing history.

Their overall algorithm hasn't changed in years either. An algorithm that could handle 100 thousand viruses on a 1GB hard drive grinds to a crawl checking for 100 million viruses on a 1TB hard drive.