Fake Virus Alerts While Surfing the Internet

A common tactic to try to get a virus/malware on to your computer system is to make you panic and click on something. By clicking on it you actually "accept" the hidden software and allow it to install itself on your system (at work or at home). The most common form of this is the fake virus warning message, you're busy looking at some innocuous web site when suddenly the view changes to something like the following...

Notice that the above screen shot is still within Firefox, it's a website pretending to be your computer presenting the file manager view and a system message! Here in the District our anti-virus software is called Kaspersky, you can safely ignore anything saying something else, including so called 'Windows Security Alerts'.

Now at this point if you click pretty much anywhere within your browser you are in trouble! You need to close Firefox or Internet Explorer (whichever you are using) without clicking on it or even the cross in the top right. The safest way to do this is to bring up the task manager (right-click on the task bar at the bottom and select Task Manager), under the applications tab highlight your browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer) and then click 'End Task'. This will safely kill it.

There is of course a video on how to do this... WindowsTaskManager

It's worth practicing once or twice yourself before you need it. It can also help if an application ever freezes on you and you can't close it.

-- SteveRippl - 11 Mar 2011