Microsoft reports your computer is infected

Daughter brought over her laptop today. A popup saying something like "Microsoft reports your computer is infected with a virus that is transmitting credit card and other info. Phone this 800 number for a fix." was blocking her Win10 Edge browser. She knew it was fake, but could not get rid of it, so had no control in the browser. I suspect it was a popup ad some site had showed.

I checked her Control Panel - Programs list, and sorted it by date, and there was a new program installed today, named Trusteer Endpoint Protection. She said she had not installed any programs. I looked that up, and IBM does have something named that, which confused me. But she had no IBM software, and had not installed anything, and the problem started today. So I removed the program, and it appears to be the answer. I conclude the malware must have appropriated the IBM name, but really not at all sure what happened.

Yup! Complete scammers. If you had called they probably would have wanted access to the PC to "fix" it. Then they would have installed ransomware and said you needed to send them several hundred dollars to regain access to your PC and all the data. Hopefully they machine has a good anti-virus program because you will want to run a scan to make sure their is nothing else bad on the system. In the meantime, do NOT use the PC for anything critical like on-line banking or on-line purchases until you are sure all the malware has been removed. Some people will even suggest that you wipe out the drive and reinstall everything from scratch.

Yeah, this kind of stuff gets my MIL all the time.

Some times this stuff seems to sneak in through questionable browser extensions and what not, at least that seems to be a common entry point for her. I've also pointed my MIL's computer to a DNS based security product, as well as activating some web filtering on her wifi router to try and cut down the sites that this stuff can redirect to. A good malware scanner is a good investment too.

Cos of some unwanted viruses, I bought on Saturday this : https://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/internet-security.html

It is amazing how clean and protected my com now is.

That happened to my Dad a few weeks ago. It totally locked up his computer. He had to take it to his computer guy to get it repaired. Apparently, his virus protection didn't work.

Yes. Known scam and that "800" number probably isn't...and you'd get a monster phone bill.


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Open a cmd prompt and type msconfig - then click on the startup tab. It will show you a list of all the programs that start when the system first boots up. Find this program remove the check mark, reboot. This will most likely fix the problem, if it does you know that's the culprit and then it's just a matter of finding it and deleting it off the hard drive. If you don't already have a good virus scanner of some sort I recommend you get Microsoft security essentials from their website

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