Because of the number of freely available Anti Virus programs available today, most persons don't seem to have a lot of problems with Viruses now, however there are a number of very malicious Malware and Adware files around, and are most often found in downloaded software etc.
My neighbour's son was surprised several nights ago when he received a popup message informing him that his computer was infected with a virus. What should have alerted him to the fact that this was a bogus message was the fact that it did not emanate from his installed AV software but from a seemingly innocent web based program, the second thing that should have alerted him was that it told him to go to a website and download the software to remove it. (MS Removal Tool)
Under no circumstances download this self installing program, as, IT IS A VIRUS
Most AV programs will not remove it once it installs, and once running, it continually displays warnings that you computer is infected with everything from cancer to the common cold, and informing you that to enable the removal part of the program you must pay a fee. I will also disable many programs making it even harder to remove.
For persons with a moderate knowledge of these things it is able to be removed but is still a long and frustrating job, necessitating the downloading of a number of small programs, firstly to temporarily cripple the rogue software, and then remove it, after which you must then replace your "Hosts" file to prevent further reinfection. All of the above must be done in a precise order and without rebooting the infected computer.
The whole job took me five hours with the removal tool taking over an hour to detect and remove
some of the files, and then this was subsequently finished off with the use of another downloaded program (Combofix), that should not be used unless the user is aware of the importance of the various files it may ask to delete. To use it without this knowledge could well see you doing a complete disk format and reload.
The point of this post is to warn you of about this problem with the rogue program "MS Removal Tool".
