When in doubt ask a search engine.

This weekend went pretty smooth, decent weather, a birthday party, and nobody I know got hit by conficker. Well... maybe I was wrong ... a friend called yesterday asking if I would have time to stop by on Monday and take a look at their computer. Thinking it was probably a corrupt application or something simple I started asking questions...

What is the computer doing?

Every time I turn on the computer a window pops open and runs a scan on my computer, and then it tells me that I have 27 viruses, spyware, and other areas of concern.

Does it do anything else?

It runs really fast and even opens an internet page where I was able to download this tool to fix the problems.

Did you download that tool?

I tried the tool but it said I need to register and pay before it would fix my problems. I know you always tell me not to use my credit card on the internet unless I'm sure of the source, so I thought I'd call and ask.

Turns out this is a scam many people see over and over, in many cases the "tool" is a hoax or a scheme to trick the individual into sharing personal information, or even something as harmless as spending 20 dollars.

So what should you do if something pops up on your computer and takes you to a website. Well a good first practice is to open a search engine like yahoo, google, askjeeves, or your favorite. Go ahead and type the name of the tool that opened on your computer into the search area and read a few articles about what the tool really does. If you don't find anything about it, you may be ok to use the tool, but always do a little research.

If you have something like this installed on your computer, I would suggest calling a professional computer repair person. Although it is possible some antivirus programs and anti-spyware tools could clean up the problem, many of these pop ups bring additional viruses, and spyware plugins which could leak your personal information.

For anyone who really wants to dig into fixing these issues, I came across a good website which lists many of these malware/adware/spyware applications, and how to clean them:

http://www.cexx.org/adware.htm.

Please be careful out there and always do your research when your downloading and installing "tools".

Comments

[John Gardner]

Good Advice Jake.

Being on the help desk I see a lot of these "tools" first hand. Most of them look pretty legitimate and seem to works as advertised until they ask for money. As for when they first pop up on your screen (before they get installed that is), you might want to take caution when closing out of the windows. Most of these windows are coded in such a way that the “X” in the top right hand corner is actually not a close button, but instead it is an accept button that will trigger the install. I suggest that you use the key combination of Alt+F4 (which is the windows command for close the current window), to close these windows.

On another note, most of these tools rely on the user to be running Microsoft Internet Explorer which is the default web browser in Windows. For casual browsing at home I would suggest people look at alternative browser such as Firefox or Google’s new Chrome browser. They do all the same things for the most part and take away a lot of the risk.