Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Eyal Goldshmid: What to do (and not to do) when a virus strikes

Eyal Goldshmid: What to do (and not to do) when a virus strikes

Eyal Goldshmid: What to do (and not to do) when a virus strikes

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 10:59 AM PDT

Q. My computer recently has been infected with a virus. For help, I called McAfee, who makes my antivirus program, but they said that their product cannot catch every virus out there, and they are asking $89.95 (and to ship the system to them) to repair the problem. A program called Total Security seems to be the cause of my trouble, as I am receiving pop-ups from it every few minutes, in which I'm asked to sign-up for their system and give them $79.95 to repair everything. McAfee told me not to give them my credit card information because they will only take my money and not fix the problem. One of my friends told me to reinstall Windows XP and start from scratch. Do you have any suggestions? I would prefer not to spend $89.95 with McAfee.

Joe Hurtak, Lauderdale Lakes

A. McAfee is right on two accords here.

First, under no circumstances should you give your credit card information to Total Security or any other entity displayed in recurrent pop-ups like what you're describing, as this is a common virus-based scam used by unaccredited online sources to steal your identity and further damage your computer.

Second, it is true that McAfee cannot stop all viruses out there — no anti-virus program can do that. It will protect against a majority of them, but there will always be a small percentage of infections that pass through their defenses.

In those cases, it's often best to scan your system with a different antivirus to see if that other program can fill in the gaps left by your McAfee application.

In this case, try an alternative virus scanner, like AVG.

Visit www.avgfree.com and download the free virus scanner available there. Install it, disable your McAfee program (sometimes two antivirus programs running simultaneously on one system will cancel each other out) and run a full system scan, deleting everything that turns up. Hopefully, this will find and remove the infection and get you back on your feet.

If it doesn't, then you may want to take the computer to a local shop, as they will charge about the same as McAfee does to rid your system of the virus, and you won't have to ship the machine anywhere.

egoldshmid@yahoo.com

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