What To Do If You Get a Fake Pop-up Alert

Important Note: The following information is very important.  It is advisable to come back and read this on a regular basis to help serve as a reminder for you.  It contains critical and specific steps to take should you receive a fake virus/spyware pop-up alert (or any variation of fake pop-up messages) when you are surfing the internet.  There is a wrong way and a right way to handle these pop-up's, and it's not necessarily intuitive what you should do! 

Overview

While surfing the net, if you should suddenly receive a pop-up window “claiming” that ‘You have a severe virus and need to download some software’, or, ‘Your computer needs to install anti-virus software, install this program, it’s free’.  STOP!  Read below before you do anything.


These pop-ups are carefully crafted to look and sound authentic, but they are fraudulent.  These pop-ups take advantage of social engineering techniques, your busy schedule and incredulousness concerning this type of security threat. 

What to do and What NOT to do...

What to do:

Shutdown you computer immediately.  Reboot it and run a full virus scan!

What NOT to do:

Do NOT click the X on the pop-up window to close it.  And, of course, don't click anything inside the box either.  If you click the X to close the box, it will close the pop-up, HOWEVER it will also transparently download a virus onto your computer - all without your knowledge!

Notes:

There are many variations of this bait (like pop-up's that claim to clean your registry), so you need to apply the same technigue above to any of these fake pop-up boxes.  The con-artists and criminals are always tweaking these messages in order to fake you out - so much so, these pop-ups have a security term of there own: Scareware.

If you are in an Administrator account and click any part of the pop-up, even the X (as discussed above) you will wreak havoc on your computer!  Although you can still get infected from a limited account, a privileged account (such as an Administrator account) will give the keys of your entire operating system over to this virus!

Microsoft has written about this problem [please read this]:          http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/rogue.aspx

Some Examples of

Fake Anti-virus Pop-ups

Microsoft has written about this problem [please read this]: http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/rogue.aspx

Conclusion

If you should receive one of these fake pop-ups
(you can usually tell because they pop up instantaneously while
surfing the internet), then you should shutdown you computer immediately and then reboot it and run a full scan of your anti-virus software!