Well OMG after over a week of dealing with this I can conclude this is one of the worst infection I have dealt with in a long time. Infact from a couple of different points, it looks legit I mean the whole thing to the untrained eye makes you think its a valid product that will fix problems on your PC.

The inner workingins are horrible…it installs fake Blue Screens of Death, fake security warnings and actual Viruses.

Getting rid of it is a pain…you need to run Spybot, Adaware, Malwarebytes and AVG. Also if you have mutiple logins you need to perform the process on all logins as it infects them all seperatley.

Bottom line here people is if it pops up its BAD.

Practice safe computing and be careful what you click.

Thought I would write a little on this horrible fake and deciving software. Reason being is the 11 seperate clients in the past 2 weeks that have been infected by it. Probably not a lot in the grand scheme of things but I live in a town with a population of 3000 so 11 is a lot and they are just the ones i know about.

Antivirus 2009 is a clone of the infamous Antivirus 2008. Antivirus 2009 usually come up after you installed a video codec that come with Trojan, malware and virus. Antivirus 2009 normally generates fake and misleading system popup error messages so end-users will be tricked into purchase Antivirus 2009.

It is very important to remove all the components of of the Antivirus 2009 and all the malware and trojans that it might have come bundle with (such as zlob.trojan, trojan.vundo and Trojan.Downloader).

Yep this is a nasty one. Of course no one actually knows how it got on their PC but a simple read from the countless references I googled explains that it comes from sites of dubious nature, be it porn sites, warez sites or free music sites. In my experience its usually a teen or child in the family that has inadvertently downloaded it…but whos going to admit it

Once infecyed you get a myriad of pop ups, scan windows, hijacked web pages and even fake Blue Screens of Death. All trying to make you shell out $50.00us to fix these problems….its a SCAM none of it is real but its slick and persistant.

Now the clincher here is getting rid of it…it gets itself deep into your system and can be a bugger to shift. Generally I find a combination of Addaware, Spybot and AVG to be fairy successful in cleaning an infected system, run one after the other.  This takes time, patience a little know how too…but is preferable to giving the scumbags that make this your cash.

As at writing this I am trialing a program called Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, which says it will get rid off it completley…I will know the results soon.

Moral here is just because it says its the be all and end all of your PC problems doesnt mean its actually true.

This little gem arrived a few days ago. Since the iPhones battery isn’t the best I thought it prudent to get an emergency option. Having used it once as a test I am pretty pleased. It does charge the iPhone well. It charges off the iPhone charging cable and you can even have it plugged into the phone and charge both at the same time. So for $25 I say it’s a winner.

Just because Im a nerd and happy to admit it today I installed a cople of cool things to the blog today.

One is an iPhone skin, you cant see it from a normal browser window but fire up Safari on your iPhone and check out the neatly formatted goodness.

The other thing I installed was a little plugin called ShareThis. It allows you to send posts to your friends via email, post on your own blogs or vis social websites like Digg, Facebook, Delicious and many more.

I hope you enjoy these little enhancements.

Had a question from gadgetlady after I posted my last tip and that was in relation to firewalls. There are plenty of schools of thought about them and ill be the first to admit that they are necessary  but also a big nuisance if you want simplicity.

I tend to be of the opinion that the “basic” Windows firewall combined with the NAT firewall in most modems/routers is more than sufficient for the majority of users.

You have to look at it this way, its a bit of a trade off security vs simplicity. In my experience simplicity will win out, but in the case where someone wants security first then they need to be prepared to learn how to manage a fair portion of it themselves. Most software firewalls require quite a bit of user intervention to not only get started but to be maintained.  So keep this in mind when deciding on what you want and be prepared for some gnashing of teeth should you go down the software firewall path.

After a week of virus and spyware removal I can’t stress enough how important keeping your PC’s antivirus and antispyware software up to date. But this is twofold it’s one thing to update them but you need to run them on a regular basis. This can take time so I recommend running them overnight so it doesn’t impact on your day.
For me a combination of AVG,Spybot and Addaware is more than efficent and all are free.
Doing these things goes a long way to keeping your system running smooth.

Well its monday today and my laptop is still here in the office all boxed up and waiting to be picked up. But not a courier to be seen. I mean really how hard is it to get a courier to call me to arrange a time to pick it up.

Cant say I am too impressed at the moment. I did call Medion and by me getting a little grumpy they “contacted” the courier who is supposed to call me today…sigh we will see.

Are you tired of remembering all those online passwords for all the websites you have signed up to be a member of, or do you just want a simple way to access passwords for these online resources. Well this may be for you SuperGenPass.

SuperGenPass allows you to remember just one password (your “master password”), which is used to generate unique, complex passwords for the Web sites you visit. SuperGenPass is a bookmarklet, so there’s no software to install. It works right from your Web browser and integrates with login forms. SuperGenPass never stores or transmits your passwords, so it’s easy and safe to use on multiple computers—even while traveling. It’s also completely free.

Its simple, easy to use and will give you a few less things to remember. Give it a try.

This type of thing doesnt happen often but hey what ya gonna do. My Medion laptop decided it didnt want to boot. While this usually isnt a problem, because its under warranty I cant really troubleshoot the hardware myself. All I can do is box it up and ship it to the company for diagnosis.

Medion have been very cool and helpful with this problem. A courier will be picking it up in the next couple of days. In the meantime Im working on an old IBM Thinkpad…Yikes

Quick mention of a great weather link. From a site called ozPDA comes a really nice weather page for Australian iPhone users OZweather head on over there to get the latest forecasts and outlooks for many cities and towns around Australia. All weather data is from Bureau of Meteorology

I love stuff for Aussies