How to recognize fake or rogue antivirus software

Recognizing fake or rogue antivirus programs is pretty simple.

You have probably been surfing or working across the internet before, then suddenly, a box pops up and says: “You have been infected with X amount of viruses, trojans, and spyware,” or something similar. Then asks you to click here to run a full scan.

Now this is not something you should panic over, but rather calmly assess the situation before making any sudden attempts to fix it yourself. First, do not immediately click to scan your system, because if this is a rogue virus, then clicking scan will further infect your system and pull down more nasty programs.

At this point, if you are at your place of employment, you should immediately contact your IT Department and let them handle it from here.

For everyone else, check to make sure this program is not your systems antivirus program, read everything on the page carefully. If you cannot determine this, do not click anything and never give them your credit card or other personal information.

Immediately attempt to close it out with task manager by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, then click Task Manager. Go to your processes tab and close out any unfamiliar processes until the windows goes away. Do not worry about closing out the wrong thing, except maybe unsaved work, the rest of the processes will reload when you restart your computer.

Now once you have the program closed out, run a few scans to make sure you are not infected. Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware are great tools to get this accomplished.

What happens if you are infected and cannot bring up the Task Manager? You can find out more on how to remove these in the article named: How to remove fake or rogue antivirus software.

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