Vista - Fake antivirus programs

Hi ALV

No program is entirely secure and nothing is guaranteed against 0-day threats but this is where a top heuristics engine comes into play, Heuristics works on behavior and other patterns malware exhibits, so this is still the best defense against 0-day stuff.
We're ALL still torn my friend...we're all still torn..
Nod32 has what's considered to be the BEST heuristics engine today and this is what puts them just above other competitors in most opinions.

Yah...sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do eh.
I'm sure MBAM got all of the Zlob variant, but maybe something else got you as well. We'll never know will we and I'm with you that it's probably best to just start clean again after any infection, even if you (seemingly) get rid of it.

How true pooch...how true. I HATE this B.S. about MS having to bow to other companies because they feel "left out". So what...it's MS's OS and they can do what they want with it can't they? That's how I feel about this...if I worked on something and built it so others could still plug in outside things, why would I now have to appease their wishes about what I can or can't do with MY product...

Still tho, MS hasn't been known to use the best products, their firewall in it's default config is almost useless and you can only configure it with certain versions so many users are stuck with it in default, and OneCare is garbage, so even if they did have programs for full protections they probably wouldn't be the best choices for the jobs.

Exactly, and the day that Linux and Mac users understand this and stop this crap "My OS is immune so I don't need this stuff" talk, the better off they'll be and maybe start taking security a little more seriously.

People should learn to report to their nearest techie when prompted with something like that, just so they can be told not to click it. It'll cost them less in the long run, unless the techie is their friend or something.

Sad though that people are so easily fooled.

Got me. Just got sideswiped by the dreaded Antivirus Virus. killed my exe relationships so I could only run Firefox or IE (strange that) Screwed my icons so they all looked the same, and put links in my start menu.
Ran everything , System AV, Malabytes, Defender - No threat. I fixed up the exe, repaired the Icon cache, deleted every record recommended. Seemed alright, then, internet freeze, programs started "not responding". I did a backup restore from Acronis and I think it's gone.

Google Running Ads for AntiVirus 2008

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While researching an antivirus article here at Maximum PC, we noticed something very curious: a Google AdWords link

called “Antivirus xp 2008,” which led to the url “antivirus-world-2009.com.” (Don't go there)
Anyone who’s been paying attention during the last year or so know that "Antivirus xp 2008" is the name of one of the most widespread and obnoxious bits of malware floating around the internet. It hides itself in your system and launches a bogus antivirus program at intervals to warn you that you’ve got spyware and trojans and the sky is falling. Then, it recommends that you buy the pro version of the program, which presumably also does nothing except rip you off. The virus is frequently updated to evade malware removal tools, and is just generally a pain.



So why is Google advertising for it? It’s not exactly tough to figure out that the site is hosting the virus; the link is called “antivirus xp 2008” after all. Well, maybe we should say that it’s not tough for users like us to figure out that it’s a virus—we suspect that less-experienced surfers (our moms, for instance) could very easily be duped into clicking the link, particularly if they were already searching for antivirus software.
And there’s reason to believe that Google knows the site hosts malware. We know that Google purges so-called “attack sites” from its index, and when we searched for “site: antivirus-world-2009.com,” which ought to turn up all pages at that domain indexed by Google, we got zero results. This isn’t conclusive, of course; there are other reasons that a site might not be indexed by Google, but it is suspicious. Malware-hosting sites are generally designed to try to climb to the top of the Google results page, and it’s probably safe to assume that a site that advertises with Google would be search-savvy enough to get its page indexed, if it weren’t blacklisted.



So what’s the deal? Are cases like this simply oversights, or is it Google policy not to subject its advertisers to the same scrutiny that the rest of the web undergoes? A Google spokesman responded to this question in typical form, saying "Google is committed to ensuring the safety and security of our users and our advertisers. As soon as we are aware of any violations of our policy, we work quickly to investigate and remove sites that serve malware in both our ad network and in our search results. As such, we've removed this site from our ad network."
Us? We're not totally convinced. It seems like there's more Google could be doing more to insure that its advertisers aren't trying to hurt its users, and that it ought to be performing those checks before it hosts the ads.

Why is Google Running Ads for Known Malware Sites? | Maximum PC

*DUH* Because sales and tech staff is not the same people. I hate when they try to make simple things look like some kind of conspiracy...

The point of the post is not to do with conspiracy, but rather that Google as an organization has a duty of care to it's users. Accepting money to promote a rogue program that will harm it's customers is a breach of that duty of care. It's like a butcher selling bad meat. It's not on!