Friday, December 17, 2010

Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2011

I have just seen screenshots of Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2011 on Cnet. One of my first impressions is that it has a interface that is very similar to Panda Cloud Antivirus.

Just a random thought. :)

Friday, December 3, 2010

Contracted virus: automatically opens www.toughdiseases.com. How I got rid of it.

Introduction
Here I am, reading my daily dose of the Dilbert blog, when a tab suddenly opens to a disease that discusses "tough diseases". Well, I'm not sick so I quickly click the X that exits it in firefox. Wait... how did the tab open anyway.

"Must've clicked a banner ad", I thought to myself.

The process repeats itself over again.

Conclusion
I must've contracted some unwanted malicious application. Argghh *rage*. Anyway, its my fault for disabling the antivirus and threatfire for easy anticheat (what's so bad about gamers hacking anyway?) and forgetting to turn it back on.

This post summarises what I did to remove it. 

First, I did some research. Simple google search of "toughdisease.com" came up with several facts.
  • This problem was observed more extensively with Mozilla Firefox but also observed in Google Chrome. 
  • Pop-up blockers seemed to have little effect in alleviating the problem. 
  • Much of the advice was pretty standard such as run a virus scan/malware scan with these recommended products including adware, spybot, malwarebytes antimalware, comodo etc. An interesting advice was to start Mozilla Firefox in safe mode to determine that it isn't an addon causing the problem.
Next,  I restarted Windows in safe mode and ran a virus scan with my much forgotten Avast! antivirus. (disable for stupids reasons discussed above.) after a long update.You may download it here. Now, in safe mode, run a full scan of all computer hard drives and removable storage devices. Set the scan settings to thorough and select scan archives.

Say good bye to www.toughdiseases.com. I just removed a tough disease from my life.