AntiVirus Popup: hoax?

[Gnimic]

Everytime I connect to the internet, a popup tells me that I have a worm or trojen or some sort of high risk virus on my PC, I have an updated version of Avast on my PC (Avast is not the popup) and it finds no virus on my PC. The popup is filled with advertising for a free Antivirus scan. It sometimes redirects me to pages offering spyware scans etc. I think that this is a hoax. Its irritating too. help would be highly appreciated on removing this pest from my PC.
I also run a-squared free and a Sunbelt firewall (these are not the culprets of the popups either as I installed these after the popup attack began)

[nihil]

Please "Google" for and obtain:

AdAware SE

EWIDO

A-Squared

SpyBot Search & Destroy

Update them and run them, then let us know how you got on

EDIT: You have scumware on your machine......

[Gnimic]

"Scumware is any programming that gets on your computer from Internet sites without your consent and often without your knowledge. It looks as if the problem is going to get worse in the near future because a lot more marketing companies are starting to turn to this tool." quoted from a Google search. This is worse than advertisements on TV!!! but how does it get on? Hmmm...

Anyway.. I updated every posible thing to update, installed and scanned AdAware and A-Squared and ... It seems to have found and removed a lot of "ALEXA". but the prob was not solved.... however I googled some process names that I did not know and came up with isnotify.exe = spyware. So I killed the process and renamed the extention. Seems to have worked.

[nihil]

Hi,

Yes, that is what I meant by "scumware"...............it won't intentionally harm you because it wants to do business with you. The rest I call "malware".

Another aspect of the problem (apart from the annoyance) is that some of this stuff is badly written and has certainly not been tested in your environment so it can cause conflicts, crashes and performance issues.

Please try EWIDO and SpyBot as well. They all tend to find different things. SpyBot has a useful toolbox and an "immunisation" feature as well. EWIDO will run as a full system for a month but you can still update it and use it manually (which I prefer) after that, for free

I have found that people I have set up with FireFox and the Adblock and Scriptblock plug ins don't get these problems anything as frequently as those using IE for general surfing.

As a "pay for" I quite like PC-Cillin's internet security suite. It has a "content filter" or "blacklist" of sites that are known to harbour malware/scumware. You can override it but then you know what you are letting yourself in for. I think that all the other major AV players have a commercial security suite that is similar.

I have personally had no problems with IE in over 4 years, but my security is set rather high and I only use it for sites that I think I can trust. If I were going to use it for general surfing I think I would give "SandboxIE" a try. It runs IE in a "sandbox" that you can clear out after each session, and blocks it from most of the rest of your system.

If I really wanted to go heavily into "trolling the darkside" I would probably use Linux in a Virtual Machine environment. You could do the same with Windows, but you would need to be careful of the MS EULA to remain legal.

Cheers,

[brokencrow]

Try doing an online scan or two and see what they turn up.

http://www.pandasoftware.com/CMSPAND...CHEHINT=Guest#

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

[Gnimic]

Thanks a lot people.... I think I got it with the isnotify.exe that I deleted and the anti-software I got... I use firefox btw and it still got on my pc... IE has too many bugs and too many updates you need to download for my liking... Thanks to you and google, this has opened my eyes to whole load of stuff

[Moira]

P2P sites can be the source of a lot of this kind of stuff too. If the actual program doesn't install spyware, then it's a fair bet that some of what you download will contain trojans.

I recently acquired Trend Micro and I think it's excellent. Unfortunately it isn't free, and I'm currently on a 30 day trial. I also have Spybot and Adaware, but went looking for Trend Micro (or something similar) when Adaware "froze" during every single scan. This happens with both the paid for and the free version and not always during the same part of the scan. It's annoying and illogical like so many things to do with computers, and easier just to find a different program.