Hello, I'm in urgent need of assistance or an explanation.
Last night I went to a site I always go to (Deviantart) to sweep through my messeges and things. Unfortunately, DA seems to have no control of their ads and one of them was a redirecting kind of ad that threw me into one of those things that automatically downloads something. I am no stranger to those, so I did what I usually do to escape them (hitting as many cancels as it would take until task manager opened so I could close IE).
But then immediately after something on my Vista called "Antivirus Vista 2010" started to alert me of something like 25 viruses on my laptop. I paniced, but I'm not one to fall for scams, so I had NIS do a full system scan where the only thing found was the usual tracking cookie.
The mysterious program kept telling me otherwise though and everytime I told it to close or block something it would tell me I had to register. It looked pretty legit so I clicked the register button once, but nothing popped up to make me register it so I just left it alone (meanwhile it kept scaring the hell out of me by saying "You have 25 infections!").
I searched around on Norton's website to see if they knew what it was and read the articles about fake antivrus software. One of the articles suggested I change something on the NIS firewall to stop the program but I could not locate what it was telling me to change.
But then I went into my control panel and the curious thing is that the program seems to be connected to my Vista's Security Center since the window that pops up with the list of infections also contains the computer firewall and such (but trying to change ANYTHING in it requires registration).
So I am very confused. Is this "Antivirus Vista 2010" legitimately something Microsoft made (poorly) and pre-installed, or is it a fake? If it is a fake, how do I get rid of it?
I should also inform you that while it was bugging me frequently last night, it has not popped up to bug me again tonight and I have been on for at least an hour. Nothing on my laptop seems changed or out of the ordinary either.
Can someone please help me?