Yesterday afternoon I got infected with one of those awful fake virus things. I kept getting popups waning me that my computer was infected and suggesting I buy Antivirus JS for $69. This was a particularly bad one that prevented most things from running on my computer. I couldn’t even bring up TaskManager to kill it. Could not run McAfee virus scan or much of anything else. I rebooted in Safe Mode and ran the virus scanner which took all night (0ver 1 million files). This morning I rebooted with my fingers crossed and – nada – the infection was still there.
A friend had sent me links to a couple of programs that might remove the infection but I tried those and the virus prevented them from running. My last hope was to take advantage of a virus removal service that McAfee offers remotely. But.. I had to get to there web site to order it. Internet Explorer as compromised by the virus so it would only go to the fake antivirus page. Google Chrome would not even run. In desperation I clicked on Firefox and voila I got to the McAfee site. I had planned to purchase the remote virus removal service via chat but couldn’t find the page that gave that choice so I just clicked on Purchase. That gave me a phone number to call. I hooked up with a man named Thomas Abraham, probably in India. The first few things he asked me to try did not work. Although we got to the remote access software that he needed to use, my virus would not let that program run. He had me reboot in Safe Mode with networking and we got him connected. He took over my computer and, for the next 45 minutes or so, went through dozens and dozens of steps to find and eliminate my infection. It was fascinating to watch although he was working very fast. We had terminated our phone conversation; he said we could use chat. The moment of truth came when he said he was going to reboot the machine in normal mode and I should watch for error messages. Thankfully I did not see any and waited, holding my breath, to see if the virus would reappear. It did not! Hoooooray! He performed another bunch of tasks and then informed me in the chat window that everything was fixed. I felt like jumping up and clicking my heels. I am still amazed that they can do that.
