What can I do about "Fake App Attack: Fake AV Website 20"?

Norton Security | Norton Internet Security
21
Krusty13 wrote:

I'm not upset with you, Lynn.

 

Can I point out that I did say in my first reply to you, "Please do not try to remove this on your own as it can make things much more complicated"?

 

 

Well, in your second sentence (with underlining and red lettering and everything) you sound a little rankled.     ;-)   :D 

 

I honestly didn't think that uninstalling the VPN program would have any deleterious effect on the "Fake App Attack 20" situation -- I thought it would either be neutral or would help. 

 

Remember that other people don't think like computery-techie people do.  :-)

 

22

Is there a place on the Norton Community forums where I can ask my question about general VPN recommendations?  Perhaps this NIS forum isn't the right place.  Would it be an appropriate topic to ask about somewhere else on this site? 

 

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In the last few years I had occasionally used a US-based VPN that I liked, but which ended up having a reported security hole (that was discovered by others well before the summer of 2013, so it wasn't related to recent revelations) that they wouldn't address, either publicly or in response to my private question to their team, so I thought maybe I'd look for a new VPN, and at the same time, try to find one which is headquartered outside of the five eyes countries and extra-focussed on security, etc.  

 

This one I tried in December sounded good based on reviews, so I took up their 3-day-trial-period offer.  However, their connection/set-up explanations were not very clear, certainly not for a novice such as I, and I didn't even really know what the Open VPN companion software was doing or how to choose the connection types etc. (the first VPN I used had explained those things well). 

 

Yesterday I checked out their user forum and there was no mention of any "Fake AV App 20" or any intrusions like that.  I also checked out search engines generally for the relevant terms, but didn't see any mention of their company's name or the Open VPN software being linked to such an intrusion.  I wouldn't want to blame them for this, but it is odd that I haven't had the intrusion since I uninstalled their programs.

23

Hi, lynn. The Tech Outpost, is where you can post other questions. You may get some response there.

 

In the meantime, I hope you get some help from the malware forums we suggested.

24
F4E wrote:

Hi, lynn. The Tech Outpost, is where you can post other questions. You may get some response there.

 

In the meantime, I hope you get some help from the malware forums we suggested.

Thank you for that, F4E.  :-)

 

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An update:

 

I have been away from this thread due to a family emergency - I have not been able to spend time on this malware issue.

 

However, it's an important issue, and I won't be able to wait many more days before I'm going to need to do sensitive stuff on my computer, like internet banking, paying credit cards, and the like.  (I don't feel I can enter in personal information online until I know that everything is okay.  Of course, I may be closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.  I really should have telephoned the financial institutions last week to see if my accounts are okay.)

 

 

What I've noticed since I last updated this thread is: 

 

I didn't get any intrusion attempt notices from Norton for about 6 or so days after I deleted the VPN software (that was sitting around on my computer after I did a 3-day trial of their service in December).   Before I deleted that software, I had received quite a few of those notices every day for the previous couple of weeks.  So it was a huge improvement not to get any at all.

 

However, one day ago, I got an intrusion notice box from Norton along with the same pop up window purporting to be from Microsoft security even though it's not, and the same freezing of all my windows such that I had to go to Task Manager to shut everything down.  So this "thing" is still around.

 

In the last week, while I haven't done much of my typical activities on the computer, I've still been online a reasonable amount of time daily in order to do research on the urgent family issue (going to the search engine I usually do, going to a number of websites both familiar and unfamiliar), so it's not that I didn't use the internet at all during the 6 days when I was not warned of any intrusion attempts.

 

That's all for the moment - I will have another update on this issue to make later tonight, or tomorrow night, I expect.

25

Hi,

If there is any chance you feel that your system is infected I'd recommend a visit to one of the free sites listed to work with one of their trained volunteer staff to get the confirmation you need that you have a clean system

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com
http://forums.whatthetech.com/
http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/
http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/

Keep us posted