Police virus popping up

Today got a second call about something called The Police Virus (and not the band). It takes over your PC and warns that the Federal Police (Mexico) has discovered you are dealing in porn, and must pay a huge fine or go to jail. It throws up a large message and prevents you from doing anything on your PC.

This message is just to let people know it's just a scam, it's not for real... because both these people were worried it might be for real (even if a mistake). There is no easy fix, although I was able to get rid of the first attack, and I will be dealing with this one this afternoon.

I guess one has to be careful when cruising the porn sites.....jaja.

If U don't stop.... U'll go Blind!!

Start in Safe Mode and get the litt'l bugger outta yer Startup...

might not be a bad idea to restore to a week or a month ...

It's not in the startup...

CanuckBob wrote:I guess one has to be careful when cruising the porn sites.....jaja.

lol

I was able, with yesterday's Spyware "case", to get rid of it by doing a double system-restore. Very telling, it infects x number of sysrestore files; thus the need for multiple tries. If there hadn't been a lot of available restores, this wouldn't have worked.

It seems the spyware infects a lot of tools that one would use to fight it.

For example, booting into Safe Mode set off the auto-timer built into Windows for rebooting the system, and there is no time to check anything before the computer restarts. It also blocks the Windows Task Manager. It shows nothing in the Programs Uninstall section, has no Startup files, blah blah. It bypassed two AV systems installed, as well as AVG SafeSearch and McAfee online protection.

Following the successful restore, MalwareByes found 57 threats, most having to do with something called FunTime, whatever that is. For now, all appears well.

Which version of Windows was affected? And, what browser were the people using? I have some Windows 7 computers, but mostly use Linus, just to try and be safe.

Had an XP machine infected yesterday with "fbi cybercrime division" ransomware. It was a pretty easy fix. I was able to use safe mode. Follow this site for how too. I can't/won't vouch for the software but step 1 works like a charm.

I have used Nortons Internet Security for the past 5-6 years and so far have had no problemos. Just keep it updated automatically.

Norton will not protect against this particular strain, nor will any AV or AS tool, unfortunately. At least not yet.

I, too, discovered Anvi when researching this threat, and it helped once but did not help in two other cases. It did leave behind a whole mess of other tools that auto-run, that I then had to remove. However, as long as you have Internet access, it's easy to download and install. I haven't seen any reviews of the software in any of the recognized magazines/websites.

So far the affected machines I have seen include XP and W7.

I know someone who had this happen to their computer last week. He said a technician came and fixed/restored the computer in 10 minutes.

He also showed me an example of a typical "warning" page from the "Policía Federal de México". It listed all kinds of potential "detected offenses" and wasn't limited to porn. (Copyright infringement, other stuff, long list. Pretty much covered all the bases so that every computer user on earth would find themselves guilty of something.)

And for your convenience, you could pay the multa in several easy ways.

Cyber-extortion. Ignore, then restore.

There are many entities using the basic concept, with the spyware underlying the messages doing different things, and having different levels of "intelligence". So the fix depends on what you find during troubleshooting.

it also exists in the US as the FBI virus, it is usually picked up when a web server is infected.