Help, I have a virus!
And no, penecilin won't cure this one.
It's something called the Smit Fraud virus (that's what the guy at Dell thought is was). It is a royal pain in the ass. Every so often a message will pop up saying that I have a virus and will direct me to some website to "buy" virus software. It won't let me access any website that has anything to do with virus protection/removal. I have Mcafee on my computer, but this thing still snuck in and Mcafee isn't detecting it, neither is Windows Defender (I am running Vista). One guy I talked to thinks it might have come in from a poker website (I recently installed Pacific Poker for the CPF League games).
Anyone have any suggestions? I have talked to a couple computer places and they say the only way to get rid of it completely is to reformat the computer, which sucks becasuse I have a lot of files, emails, etc. that need to be backed up ahead of time (it is a business computer), which also means that I have to do it on a day when my store is closed.
Thanks in advance.
It's something called the Smit Fraud virus (that's what the guy at Dell thought is was). It is a royal pain in the ass. Every so often a message will pop up saying that I have a virus and will direct me to some website to "buy" virus software. It won't let me access any website that has anything to do with virus protection/removal. I have Mcafee on my computer, but this thing still snuck in and Mcafee isn't detecting it, neither is Windows Defender (I am running Vista). One guy I talked to thinks it might have come in from a poker website (I recently installed Pacific Poker for the CPF League games).
Anyone have any suggestions? I have talked to a couple computer places and they say the only way to get rid of it completely is to reformat the computer, which sucks becasuse I have a lot of files, emails, etc. that need to be backed up ahead of time (it is a business computer), which also means that I have to do it on a day when my store is closed.
Thanks in advance.
Comments
there's many website that offers free download, try your luck with download.com, try some shareware that works only for a couple of days...
There's also Avast ... it's a free antivirus, try some indirect link, either via google or some download site, you never know sometimes the cheapest one are the best one.
I've also found this link :
SmitFraudFix
and geez... looking at the wikipedia page, you're in for a bumpy ride to get rid of it!
SmitFraud - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Good luck !
This one is not really that hard to remove although if it has already downloaded a lot more "follow on" spyware, the mess can be quite time consuming to clean up. Have look at the linked page below for removal process but if you don't feel comfortable doing the things suggested get more professional help. First of all I would make sure you back up any really important data in case anything goes wrong.
Not sure where you are geographically but if you are not too far from me I can help physically. To date my experience removing this variant has only been on XP machines so not sure if Vista would be much different. By the way this is not from a poker site, or at least not any of the major ones, and I include Pacific in that. More likely a drive by picked up from some site you may have visited.
Couple of suggestions, Ad-Aware 2008, SpyBot spyware removal tools and AVG8 for free Anti-Virus.
PC Hell: How to Remove SmitFraud variants like WinAntivirus Pro 2007, PestCapture, and more
Whenever you get a virus you can usually just type "<Virus Name> removal" in google and get some good instructions.
I highly doubt that it came from Pacific. If their shareholders found out about something like that, chances are they would take a lot of heat.
See? This is what happens when your girlfriend gets too close to your PC with a strap-on.
Damn it, I told her to put a condom on first.
That's the thing with this virus, any sort of searching for a removal tool either returns a page not found error or sends you to their adware website no matter which link you click on.
So you're suggesting I should tell my wife to stop surfing for lesbian porn at work?
Thanks for this tips. I will try this tomorrow and let you know how I make out.