Don’t Touch The Antivirus That Pops Up And Forces You To Use It

Hello, This is BBS and I am new to the team.

Recently, I experienced a rather uneasy situation. This situation included an Internet Explorer application, a Windows XP operating system and a dell machine. One day I was happily surfing the web when I came across a rather unusual screen:




I will attempt to explain the interface that this page provides… Anything that you click on will give a “download a file” prompt. The interface looks like a remote screen of a computer's My Computer destination with the amount of drives that are on your computer along with warnings that claim that your computer is severely infected. While that page itself won't do any harm to your computer - if you have your firewall activated - the software that it wants you to download will. Seeing as how most people with inexperience would probably download the file, I was curious if it would be detected as a virus. While the file itself wasn't detected as a virus, I knew that the places where the file, once activated, would download from contained viruses and possibly worms. Since this file wasn't detected as a virus by Microsoft Security Essentials, I sent this file to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center and they sent me an email within 24 hours that said that the file was a severe virus.

It is important to note that any website that forcefully makes you scan your computer or tries to force you to download software is a website that distributes viruses and worms. If you manage to get stuck on this kind of web page, the best thing to do is close the web browser and start your surfing again. It is also important that you ignore any download prompts from the site and keep your firewall and anti-virus up-to-date.

Happy Web Surfing

-BBS