One of the PCs I use day to day is infected with some malware. *sigh*
This means there may be a slight delay while I first attempt to clean it up and then finally decide that re-installing is the only way to go.
At the moment it’s popping up a balloon in the system tray telling me the PC is infected with spyware and to click to download software to fix it. Yeah right.
Apart from the terrible spelling errors in the balloon message – “pervent” and “recomend” and no space between a full stop (period) and the next sentence – that PC won’t let me run my anti-virus or use a browser to connect to the net to look for a solution, and has disabled the security services running. It’s quite convincing looking and I can understand how people would be fooled by it.
Whatever it is, it’s quite sophisticated and a lot of effort has been put into it to think of most things someone would do to clean up their system. For instance it won’t even let me reboot the PC in safe mode which tells me that something has been installed to do that.
After pressing F8, the DOS menu to select safe mode is displayed, but I can’t move the menu selection to select it, and shortly afterwards (within about 3 seconds) it locks up.
A clever piece of software then, totally ruined by typos.
You have to laugh that someone is so clever to be able to do this, but is also enough of a dummy not to be able to use a simple English spell checker, and to not know the basics of grammar and sentence formation.
-Frank Haywood
I had that as well. It is called the Braviax virus. Just go into your drive and do a dearch for anything with the name “Braviax: in it. Delete all the files. Then go into the registry as well and delte the reference to it there, too. If you dont do that, it will replicate it self and you will be back to square one. It is designed to resist removal but if you take those steps, you will be good.
Hi Frank,
I’ve run into a similar problem in the past. I downloaded and installed some free anti-virus or antispyware software only find that it was infected. I no longer recall the exact details but, the circumstances were very similar… The balloon popup in the system tray, not being able to reboot in safe mode, etc.
I believe the software I used to clean it was called “Smith Fraud Fix.” If you have access to another PC, research it online.
I hope this helps.
Tim W.