Eye Glazer

I personally don't believe that Vista/Windows 7's UAC is "enough" for the default setup. You know: the one where there's a single user account on the computer, and maybe the owner bothered to set a password. See, I think UAC is awesome; no software gets free license to do whatever it wants without the user saying OK first. (We only had the "I hate Vista's UAC" stupidity because no software developers bothered to follow Microsoft's guidelines up until that point and took the "everyone's an admin" easy-way-out.) The problem is that most people will still setup their user account as an admin, and the UAC dialog only asks a Yes/No question for administrators. It's the same problem we've had for years. What's the average user going to answer when they're trying to do something (watch a funny video, enter a site a friend told them about, etc.), and something else bugs them with a "You can't continue to do what you...

I don't know what exploit just hit, but I have now just finished my 3rd removal attempt of "Internet Security 2010" (aka "AntiVirus 2010", and all the other versions of this virus). I've never seen such a successful attack---but then again, these were all old XP machines. Anyhow, I think I finally have it down now, and I'm writing this to remind myself for next time. Get MalwareBytes Get ProcessExplorer, AutoRuns, and that command-line utility that schedules file renames during Windows' startup. Go to BleepingComputer for their guide, but also their .reg file Put it all on a USB stick So the virus sets a bunch of registry settings so that you can't use Task Manager, change the desktop wallpaper, and a bunch of other annoying things. It also makes it so one of its processes gets loaded in each time you launch an exe---so it has a chance to deny access to it and pretend it's infected. Since MalwareBytes will take care of most of it, use Process...