Viruses are a pain to deal with...

Nothing irritates me more than viruses. People waste so much time creating these sophisticated viruses (most look like anti-viruses) that are just time-consuming to deal with. Why can't these people just uses their talents to make something productive instead? Obviously these people have talent because they can find security faults and exploit them (and I'm talking about the real hackers, not the kiddies who copy-paste source code to modify it a little bit). Imagine if the hackers spent all their time doing something positive and that the anti-virus makers spent their time not fighting these viruses and doing something else, we could have some amazing pieces of software in our hands!!

I'll just add my personal experience in case it can come handy for someone else. Last night I came home to an infected computer. I've seen this virus before, it "installs" and tells you that "Antivirus 2010" (a clone of "Antivirus 2010 Security Centre") has detected malware and just prevents access to your own file, constantly showing annoying prompts and various warnings. I'm not sure how it works, but it seems that just by navigating to a site, all of this installs. It must run through some ActiveX exploit or something. It all looks very real, but my best advice when you see this is not to panic. Spam was not sent from your computer, your files are not deleted, whatever, it's not as bad as it looks. It's just a very frustrating experience.

The first thing I would do is boot in safe-mode and backup whatever is important on your computer. This is a precaution you will not find in the guide below but should anything happen, at least you have your files.

You can find full instructions for removal here and they work (I've used this twice now and both were successful). Big props to Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (I know the name sounds fishy, but it is very legit and efficient). I used to use Spybot but it proved inefficient with this specific problem.

As far as prevention goes, I'm not quite sure what is best. One thing I'm going to do is create another user and give it admin rights. Then my regular user will get its admin rights revoked. I don't know why I have not done this before, just lazy I guess. If I need to install something I'll have to change user, no big deal. At least whatever virus won't have access to an admin account when I'm browsing with my regular user. The second thing will be to revise my IE security settings, again, laziness.

So there, hopefully this will not occur anymore and I won't have to stay up until midnight to clean up my computer again. There is no way I could have gone to bed knowing this annoyance was on my PC!!