I hate, I repeat, I HATE fake antivirus programs with a fury! You know exactly what I am talking about. These are pieces of software that advertise their ability to protect and fix your machine, yet once they are installed, they take over your machine, disable your antivirus and hold your computer as a virtual hostage.

Here is an example of one of these roguee programs. It is called Antivirus 2008 and there is another called Antivirus 2009 that looks identical to it but with the different year. If you have never seen anything like this”¦ Then good for you! You are doing a great job at security (or you are using a Mac or Nix’ box!)

I’ve found a great free app that helps remove fake antivirus applications. It’s aptly called Remove Fake Antivirus. Check out the list of applications that it detects and removes. Each of these links will take you to the author’s blogspot which will tell you more about the threat.

1. Cyber Security
2. Alpha Antivirus
3. Braviax
4. Windows Police Pro
5. Antivirus Pro 2010
6. PC Antispyware 2010
7. FraudTool.MalwareProtector.d
8. Winshield2009.com
9. Green AV
10. Windows Protection Suite
11. Total Security 2009
12. Windows System Suite
13. Antivirus BEST
14. System Security
15. Personal Antivirus
16. System Security 2009
17. Malware Doctor
18. Antivirus System Pro
19. WinPC Defender
20. Anti-Virus-1
21. Spyware Guard 2008
22. System Guard 2009
23. Antivirus 2009
24. Antivirus 2010
25. Antivirus Pro 2009
26. Antivirus 360 and
27. MS Antispyware 2009

OK so I am assuming that you have one of these infections and you want to use Remove Fake Antivirus to fix your machine up. Let’s see how we can do that. First we start by downloading the application from here. That is a direct link because the download page is polluted with Google ads and confuses users as to what to download. The author’s site can be found here.

Run the application and you will first see its welcome screen listing the nastiness it can deal with and then you will see this screen:

Go ahead and hit ‘Yes’ and it will start scanning  your local machine for the fake applications listed above.

You can go ahead and click Show details to get a closer look as to what is going on:

As it goes through each possible infection you will see it listed on the console. Don’t be alarmed, this does not mean that your PC has the infections.

Up until now my only solution was Malware Bytes demo version. But now it looks like Remove Fake Antivirus 1.35 is going to be my go-to program. It took 6 minutes to run the full scan. I had originally located this application while battling Antivirus 2009 yesterday. And it worked like a charm!

Once the application has completed you will see this screen:

Click Yes and all the files that Remove Fake Antivirus could not remove because the files were in use will then be kicked to the curb. The author’s site also serves up suggestions for how to deal with and prevent these types of infections. Among them is to set the UAC prompts to the highest levels ““ I guess I should not have mine disabled, eh?

Remove Fake Antivirus – Download

For more information about fake antivirus software, read Ryan’s post “Detect Fake Antivirus software & Spyware Removal programs“. How do you deal with rouge or fake antivirus or spyware applications? Do you have policies that keep this type of stuff out of your corporate environments? What do you do or use? Please share with us in the comments so we can learn from each other!

Tagged: anti-adware • anti-spyware • anti-virus • scam