Recent Virus Making the rounds
Honestly I don’t know where this one is getting the energy from, but there is another baddie out there. This one is called Antivirus2009. This may not be that new, but it is rearing it’s ugly head again. And what really gets me- really amplifies the annoyance- is the recent customer computers I have had to clean, had an installed and running Antivirus. The product running is not one of the products I recommend, but it is one of the big companies in the security arena.
Each call I have gone out to has shown pretty much the same signs. First, you get a pop-up that says X number of problems were found and the you are asked to “Click here” for protection. Fortunately it raises enough of a red flag my clients make the call to me. But by the time this box pops-up the actual anti-virus has already been turned “off”. Now you have a partially protected machine at best. In my recent call the partial protection was actually crippling the client’s ability to use the Internet.
The problem manifested itself as “Not a valid page” error message inside Internet Explorer. This message happened regardless of which way I tried to get to a site- numeric IP or “real” name. I reset IE settings back to default and tried running IE safe mode. Same thing over and over. If I dropped into command line and ran ping it proved successful. So after running all the normal network test without any positive results, I went into “Add/Remove Programs” and there was the Anti-virus installed, but not running.Or rather it was running in a crippled/get in your way kind of state.
So I uninstalled the product and rebooted. Internet access came back. I installed a free AV solution since it was a home computer and still Internet access worked. Which brought to mind the question- if the original software on the computer was from a larger company why did it fail to protect? What exactly is the value being brought by the yearly subscription fee being paid by the user? Makes you wonder.
