We’ve recently been seeing a rash of people infected with seemingly real but in reality what is completely fake anti virus malware. The user reports that they were surfing the web innocently enough and suddenly a window appears that looked like it came from Microsoft informing them that their system is seriously infected. The window wouldn’t close when clicked and when they restarted their machine the fake anti virus software appeared to have become installed on their machine and couldn’t be removed, urgent warnings of infections are appearing everywhere, popups to embarrassingly raunchy websites are coming up and the machine is basically unusable. Uttimately the software wants you to subscribe in order to remove these “infections” and this is the object of Fake Anti-Virus it's all about getting your credit card.

If this should happen to you, DO NOT CLICK on anything and do not attempt to navigate through the Fake Anti-Virus user interface, It is not legitimate and all roads lead to you inputing your credit card. Immediately restart your computer.

Hopefully you have caught it in time but if after the reboot, you find your machine is infected, you can try to restore it to an earlier time if you are familiar with how to do this but if all else fails call a professional to clean your computer as malware infections can be very difficul to remove and you may actually damage your computer if you're not sure what you are doing or following bad or incorrect instructions.

Check out the video below from SophosLabs to see a Live Demo of Fake Anti Virus in action.