Virus warning!! - Personal Antivirus - don't install it!!!!

Hi everyone,

I know I've been totally rubbish at blogging recently, but I'm getting the girls to bed so late over the holidays that by the time I get anything done around the house and have my tea it's often 11 o'clock, and then I don't really feel like making cards and blogging!! Only a week left until they're back at school and maybe things will get back to normal.

I did do one card at the weekend for the current Passion for Promarkers challenge. Then I posted it to the recipients and forgot to take a photo of it - oops!!

I just wanted to get on here and warn you all about a virus I got yesterday. I was on the internet and loads of boxes flashed up telling me my computer was infected and I needed to install something called Personal Antivirus. Turns out that this program was the virus!!! I installed it and it told me I had loads of infections about to wreck my computer. Then it asked me for money for the program to fix it!

This is when I stopped and thought this couldn't be right - we already have Norton so I thought this should fix any viruses. I ran a virus scan on Norton and it told me there was nothing wrong, other than our back up being painfully overdue.

I googled "Personal Antivirus" and got to various sites about malware showing screens doing exactly what my computer was doing. Apparantly you can't remove it yourself using add/remove program as it lurks in the background of your computer and keeps reinstalling itself! Also, while you're trying to do anything about it, it keeps flashing up more scary messages which is a sort of self-protection for the virus to stop you getting rid of it!

I backed up our hard drive (very overdue!) then downloaded a program called Malwarebytes Anti-Malware - you can get it free!!! This scanned my system and found 257 infections which it fixed for me.

So far it seems like everything is okay on my computer and nothing has been lost so hopefully I got out of this one alright, but please be warned!!!