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Friday, November 14, 2008

Get rid of Virtumonde spyware. Use http://safety.live.com

Recently, I have no idea how, my windows xp system became infected with a spyware program called Virtumonde. The distinguishing characteristic is that ads pop up in your browser every few minutes. If you search on "spyware" then you'll be greeted with a popup that says...

ATTENTION! If your computer is struck by the spyware, you could suffer data loss, erratic PC behaviour, PC freezes and creahes.

Detect and remove viruses before they damage your computer!

Antivirus 2009 will perform a 100% FREE and quick scan of your computer for Viruses, Spyware and Adware.

Do you want to install Antivirus 2009 to scan your computer for malware now? (Recommended)
My computer runs McAffe Virusscan and is updated every single day with the latest virus definitions and it didn't detect it. I also tried Lavasoft AwAdware and it didn't detect it.

I found an awesome tool called Spybot and while it detected the infection and correctly identified it as Virtumonde, it couldn't remove it.

The tool that fixed the problem was a free web based scanner tool by Microsoft called

http://safety.live.com

Just click on the button that says "Full Service Scan", follow the prompts and wait for about 2 hours, then reboot and the problem will be fixed!

Others have reported that they have to run Spybot first and then the tool at safety.live.com but just running safety.live.com worked for me.

Update : You have to run the tool from Internet Explorer. It won't work with Firefox.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thank you i am hoping to god that this works!!!

Anonymous said...

It really work!!!
you should repeat the same task twice to be shure.
regards!!

Anonymous said...

Can anyone recommend the top performing Patch Management utility for a small IT service company like mine? Does anyone use Kaseya.com or GFI.com? How do they compare to these guys I found recently: N-able N-central performance reporting
? What is your best take in cost vs performance among those three? I need a good advice please... Thanks in advance!