© 2008/2011 Stupid Damn Computer--all rights reserved

Lately there has been a rash of what is termed "Fake Alert" spyware taking over many user’s computers.  Typically, this malware will flash a message that says essentially "Your computer is infected with malware!  This is a dire situation and you must click here to clean out your computer."  The hope is that you will buy their product, over and over in an attempt to clean out their computer.  If you do fall for it you will download even more spyware.

The big problem with this scenario is that once it takes you computer over, you cannot run anything to clean it out because it prevents you from doing so.  This seems to leave you only the option of buying the junk to get rid of it.

Being a former Boy Scout myself, my motto is still "BE PREPARED", so I want to show you a way to get ready in case something similar to this happens to your computer.

There is a free program called Rkill, (you an download it here:  DOWNLOAD RKILL  ) that is designed to jump in and kill any rouge programs running on your computer.  When you get it, you will notice that it is named rkill.com, so it is a dot COM file.  This simply means that it is a system executable file for Windows.  What I do with the program is rename it NUKE.scr, and copy the renamed file into my Windows folder.  This tells Windows that it is a screensaver file.  If your computer gets infected, you simply go into your display screensaver properties, and browse to your Windows folder, and choose Nuke.scr as your screensaver.  Then sit back and wait for your screensaver to kick in.  As soon as it does, instead of loading your screensaver, it will run the rogue killing program, Rkill.  This will kill the malware and allow you to get back into your computer, where you can update and run (or if you are like most people, install, update, and run) your anti-virus and anti-malware software to clean out your computer.

There are many varieties of this type of malware, some examples are below:

Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Do this right now, and you might save your self the cost of a trip to the repair shop later.