This is an alert for all Lutheran Teachers and anyone else who reads The Guild.  I have been dealing with a lot of viruses lately, even on my personal Laptop.  I don’t know how they get in, some say it was attached to a pdf file their friend sent.  But, everyone is vulnerable.  Well maybe not those MAC people, they always seem to say they never get viruses.  But this is no laughing matter.

The picture on the left is a popup you will get in the bottom right of your screen and the picture on the right will be a pop up you get in the middle of your screen.  As you can see, they look like legit anti-virus software.  Do not let them deceive you.  They are in-fact annoying nasty little buggers that can destroy your computer if you do not take care of them fast enough.  I even had to fix a computer a few months ago with a variation of the Soft virus that would not let you do anything after you log into your computer.

Is there hope?

Yes.  The good thing is, this virus can be fixed pretty easily and you don’t have to pay anyone to do it.  The other good thing is, unless you let it get out of control or you become their victim by buying the software they are trying to get you to buy, your information should be safe.

Here is how I took care of this issue on my personal computer last night.

After I saw that I had the virus, I saved all my important documents and pictures on a portable hard drive.  I was not able to connect to the internet or at least any pages they did not want me to see ( so the porn sites and their software page would continually pop up), so I turn off my wifi connection.  I went to my desktop and looked up some information on Antivirus Soft (this was a new name to me, one I have not seen before).  I rebooted my computer in safe mode with networking.  You do this by repeatably hitting F8 until you get the options to start in safe mode.  This will bypass the virus to open and do its stuff.  I went into Internet Explorer (Something I do not use at all normally, I stick with FireFox and Flock (Flock is built on Firefox). Under Tools and Internet Options I clicked on the connection tab.  I found the LAN settings and made sure the Proxy Server option was unchecked. This is how the virus controls your internet.  These viruses can also disable your real antivirus software including AVG and Malwarebytes.  After I took the proxy server block off, I was able to download rkill command that will get rid of the virus application.  You can find this command at many websites.  I use bleepingcomputer.com.  I then ran Malwarebytes to clean up any additional files.  After the scan was completed and I got rid of any problems I was able to reboot my computer with no problems.  I then started a full computer scan in AVG. (which make sure if you use AVG you have the latest update).

I hope this will help any struggling IT tech out there that is facing the same problem.  If you have a better solution please share with us.