Morris Minor Owners Club

Antiviruspro 2010 just arrived on the laptop at the weekend.

This appears to be a rather nasty virus, masking itself as the opposite of what it is, and attempting to get you subscribe to it in order to remove the virus which it has implanted!

We haven't been/don't go near any chatrooms; all activity is either EBay, this site (obviously), looking at daft things people do to Bond Bugs on Youtube, and occasional check of E-mails (again only serious ones-not into trivia!).
So where on earth did it spring from??

If you find it on your computer, I suggest you do not respond to the various ever increasing prompts that it throws up, and instead download Malwarebytes antimalware program(free!). This was the 4th Spyware program I tried and the only one which recognised it as a virus!

If a site you visit makes a pop up appear that says your computer may be infected you need to use the task manager to stop all instances of internet explorer (or Firefox).
What appear to be windows dialogue boxes can be sneaky I.E. pages that will "do bad stuff" wherever you click on them.

The cause is that the web site has been compromised.

The was an interesting article about this on The Register a while ago called the anatomy of a malware scam.

So its back again, goody goody lots of virused up PC's for me to fix .......again. I have had one customer who had it 3 times because he insisted on uninstaling the protection software I instaled as it "slowed his machine down too much" on the last instance I found 372 bits of rougue software on his machine he now leaves it all alone thankfully

Do you have a link to the 'Malware etc ' free program la ??

Here you go

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Here is the article about it.
A bit long at 8 pages but makes an interesting read as it shows what is happening in the backgroud.http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/22 ... of_a_hack/

Superantispyware (the free version) do a good job too.http://www.superantispyware.com/download.html

I'm amazed that more people don't get their PCs infected as hardly anyone seems to read what pop up messages say, they just click on them to make them go away.

I think there is something on this site - I only visit here and ebay and yesterday and today my firewall has been blocking a "windows update" which is not coming from Microsoft. It tries to load from time to time whilst I am browsing and always tries to load and run when I switch on....

Sounds like you are infected, run malwarebytes and superantispyware

Seconded.
How do you know it's "not coming from Microsoft" ?