My daughter unknowingly visited some rogue website and got a pop-up indicating the computer was infected. "It looked real", she said. So, my computer ended up infected with some piece of malware called System Security 2009 which basically annoys the living daylights out of you by flagging fake security threat messages until you pay them to shut it off. It also prevents users from running any software that you could use to diagnose/remove (i.e.: regedit.exe, Task Manager).
The scariest part was that Norton Internet Security 2009 (fully up to date) did nothing to detect, prevent or remove this threat. My daughter was able to visit the website (I haven't figured out which one, as it didn't even come up as a suspect site) and acquire the threat without my security suite being able to do anything about it.
From my online research this is not a new threat, as it has been around for a few months. Worse still, the Norton website says nothing about it, and the only "help" options are Symantec's paid virus removal services.
Fortunately I was able to remove it by going to other "good samaritan" sites that have some directions. I went into Safe mode, used msconfig.exe to locate the Startup entries and registry keys and deleted them. I then went to the remaining "install.exe" file for the threat, scanned it with Norton AntiVirus, and it came out clean!
While I can understand that there is no way any software could detect 100% of threats, this has been around for a while, and it's appaling and very scary that it's not in the NIS databases.
Any comments? I would sincerely love to hear from Symantec, if they monitor this board, before my subscription for 5 machines comes up for renewal in 20 days.
Thanks!
Mariano Buitrago