Beware Of Windows PC Defender

If you are a windows user, it’s likely that you have encountered the “Windows PC Defender” virus over the last year. But if you are among the few that hasn’t, there’s a very high likelihood that you will at some point in the future.

“Windows PC Defender” is one of the more common pieces if spyware disguised as Microsoft’s Windows Defender, and is likely to continue to plague the net and windows users for some time.

Removing this virus is pretty undemanding and not very technical, so I’ll try to help out my fellow geeks and explain the steps to take rofl.

This is in general how it goes, you’re surfing the internet or playing a flash game trying to rank higher, and you checkout a website that you are unfamiliar with and out of nowhere a warning window pops up. The page displays something like “Windows Defender has found X number or threats”, and there are some legitimate looking scanning graphics that you can see in the background. Keep in mind, the point of spyware is to look legitimate to con people into downloading a program to steal credit card information.

IF THIS POPS UP CLOSE THE BROWSER WINDOW, DO NOT CLICK ANYWHERE IN THE WINDOW.

Now if you are one of the unlucky people who happened to click on and install “Windows PC Defender” don’t be concerned. At this point most people are freaking out because the program normally locks you out of critical systems and disables all firewalls and virus/spyware protection programs. Do not panic geeks, follow these steps and you can save your machine in 5 minutes. Believe me it’s easier than trying to get a website listed on google page one.

Step 1) : Restart the computer – The program is in control at the moment so we need to stop it!

Step 2): Immediately Click [start]  – Time is of the essence, you need to complete steps 2-6 as quickly as possible before the virus locks you out from stopping it.

Step 3): Click [run] (win xp and previous OS only) or (for vista and win 7 users) type “msconfig” and hit [enter]

Step 4): The systems configuration window shout appear, click on the [startup] tab.

Step 5): Click [Disable All], then click [Apply], the click [ok]

Step 6): Now a window should popup asking to restart the computer for the changes to take place, click [restart] (NOTE: The programs that were disable can be enabled again by following steps 2-6 after the virus has been removed)

Step 7): Once the computer starts back up you should now have full control over your computer again and the virus should be disabled. If you have a good spyware or virus removal program you can try running that, but if you don’t open your web browser and go to http://www.malwarebytes.org/ and download and install Malwarebytes. Malwarebytes is a free program that is definitely capable of removing “Windows PC Defender” and many other malicious programs.

Step 8): Run a scan using Malwarebytes or your preferred virus removal program. “Windows PC Defender should be found and quarantined in a relatively short amount of time.

Step 9): Once the scan is complete remove the virus and follow any further instructions made by the anti-virus software.

That’s all there is to know about removing this annoying virus. Hopefully you geeks have learned something lol, and will be able to avoid this virus from infecting your rig altogether.