Rogues

I spent most of my time this past weekend working on two customer machines that had been infected by rogue programs. One rogue was XP DEFENDER and the other was SECURITY TOOL.

If your system becomes a host to one of these unwelcome visitors, most of which are recognized by their scare tactics (like YOUR SYSTEM IS INFECTED WITH .....), I strongly recommend that you shut down your computer and call me or some other qualified PC Doc type person.

The reason for recommending this is that things can get worse if you try to get out of it yourself. Things can get MUCH WORSE!

To date these rogues seem to be only a shakedown for your money, and while they mess with system settings and make recovery very difficult the longer they are present, they have not yet, in my experiences with many of them, destroyed user data like pictures, music, or video. But I predict that is coming next, so take steps NOW to back up your valuable data to some external device that is not always attached to your computer.Thumb or flash drives are okay to use for backup as long as you have one large enough to contain all of your data. I use an external 1TB hard drive that I can attach via a USB cable whenever I want to do my backups. There are also service companies that provide backup of your data.

For those of you who feel qualified and might want to attempt to recover your system without assistance, I strongly recommend SuperAntiSpyware's Portable Scanner, available free here. I now use this as the tool of first choice when I get started in tackling one of these rogues.