Stupid Hijacking Viruses

I started my evening making some progress on my homework. For once, I am ahead of the game and have several assignments in prep-mode to make my week easier. Then all hell broke loose...

A weird screen popped up on my computer telling me that I had several infections. My computer was running funky too. Web pages would not display.When I tried to open my Anti-Virus program to run it, I received a window that the file was corrupted and Windows would not open it... WTF

Thank goodness for alternate methods of getting on the internet. It all seemed a little fishy, especially since the ONLY method for correcting the situation was to pay for and download the specific Anti-Virus program that it suggested -AV Security Suite... Before doing anything more, I pulled up google on my iPhone to see if it was legitimate... I am glad I did that. I discovered that the program is designed to hijack your system to coerce you to give them money. All of the "infections" it said I had were bogus. Doing more research on my laptop (all of this took place on my desktop) showed that it overrides your internet to route everything through a proxy server (its own) and it bounce back to you with "virus warnings"...

Chances are, this program was attached to a recent download of a legitimate program I was updating. I want to say it was with the Adobe Flash update that I did... I seem to remember a checkbox for some type of Anti-Virus program...

Anyway, so I looked up ways to correct the problem. The internet is a wonderful bounty of information! I received pretty consistent data stating to restart my computer in safe mode, then correct the proxy setting in Internet Explorer, and then download and run a program called Malwarebytes. I already had this program installed on my computer, but I have the free version, so it only runs scans when I tell it to. The pay version supposedly runs scans continuously to prevent infections from happening...

I followed all the steps and was rather proud of myself for completing the task without Aaron here. He is the one who built my computer and gets irritated when he has to take hours to try and fix it for me (you know, because I break everything - but that's another story). The final step was to allow the computer to restart after removing the infections that it found...

Then, I got the Blue Screen Of Death..... Crap... Now Aaron has to try and fix it and HOPEFULLY he can do so without losing the data on the computer... I'm kicking myself now that I didn't back up my hard drive on a regular basis, especially since my computer holds the vast majority of our household records... I am extremely glad that I had the foresight to utilize a 4GB flash drive for my school work. Keeping my school work on a flash drive allows me to transfer from my desktop to my laptop to my office computer to do work.

So, this is a warning to my readers - If you experience anything like I did tonight, DO NOT buy the program and google the fix to remove it from your computer. Hopefully, the fix doesn't kill your computer like it did mine. If you haven't experienced it yet, I recommend installing and running Malwarebytes on a regular basis. Aaron and I have used this program for years, but I am not as good at running it regularly... I will now!

And, for anyone going to school, I recommend keeping your data on a flash drive and using that as your main school storage device. I usually copy the contents of the flash drive to my computer about once every couple of weeks, just in case.