My Situation: Avast VS The Fake Virus Ads

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hooboy. Hello everyone. Seems I might have gotten myself into a good bit of trouble and would like to ask for your advice before proceeding. (WARNING: Long story ahead)

Okay, so, I have the free version of Avast! and I of course have it running in the background but I don’t update the program as often as I should nor scan as often as I should.

Anyway, someone sent me an ImageShack link and due to the way my computer is set up, I can’t save images in Firefox. So I loaded the page up in my old copy of Internet Explorer only to get a message reading “AVG has detected a virus on your computer!”. Well that’s obviously fake, I don’t even HAVE AVG on my computer! So I click X but it still shows the fake virus scanning animation in Internet Explorer. Well I figure that was as good a time as any to do a REAL virus scan as I’m always suspicious of those ads (they probably put a virus on your machine just to get you to buy the faux anti-virus software), though I did find it off that Avast didn’t catch this like it normally does.

Well okay, I try to update and scan with Avast but nothing happens when I try to update. The program claims it automatically downloaded the update earlier today. Okay, cool, though odd that it sat there TRYING to download the update and not just telling me the update was already downloaded.

So okay, Quick Scan, nothing found. But THEN I notice a yellow icon next to the Avast! icon telling me my computer isn’t fully protected. Huh? Well sure enough while all the other real-time shields are up, the Web Shield is down. That’s odd. So I try to put it back up but nothing happens. It won’t go back up. Oh! My version is out of date, supposedly it downloaded the update but I need to restart my machine to install it.

Well NOW I’m paranoid. Why didn’t it tell me my Web Shield was down earlier? Why didn’t it tell me it already downloaded the newest update rather than sitting there trying for a good long while?

What’s more, it says that my current version is 5.0.677 and that the most recent version is 5.0.1000 …isn’t that an older version or does Avast just use an odd numbering scheme?

So…yeah…any of this sound suspicious to you or am I just paranoid and these are somewhat common quirks of Avast? Well regardless I’m running a full computer scan right now. If this is sounding pretty normal-ish then my plan is to restart my computer, update Avast, and re-scan the computer.

Thanks for reading and any advice is appreciated.

2

Latest version is 6.0.1000, i would set a boot time scan with avast for the best scanning results and also run a malwarebytes scan, you should have avast set to auto update.

3

Huh. Must be a typo or something because it DEFINATELY says 5.0.1000

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/8841/avastversion.gif

I’ll definitely arrange a boot time scan, but I think I’m gonna do a lite one (just the system drive) before the update and a full one after the update (unless it updates AS I reboot meaning that if I arranged a boot time scan now it would be with the newest version).

Regardless things are looking promising thus far. 200 gigs scanned and no sign of viruses yet.

4

Since you are using the free version, maybe it would just be easier to do a clen install from scratch.

Download version 6 installer via avast.com.

Uninstall old version, install new one, reboot, register via GUI.

5

Well here’s the latest update: Went to eat dinner while the system scanned and when I got back my computer had rebooted. I was informed it recovered from a serious error, sent the error report, and according to it I had apparently blue screened.

Well version 6.0.1000 is installed NOW. Also apparently it had found two viruses, both LNK: Runner (which I cannot find any info on). Well I deleted them, that’s for sure (they were on files I never used)!

So I guess I’ll just be running a boot scan in a minute since my computer managed to restart and install Avast 6 without exploding. Thanks for the support! Fingers crossed this goes over well.

6

Sounds great.

However, deleting is not the best of ideas. If possible, send them to virus-chest. In case of false alarm (which may of course occur), the files can easily be recovered and restored from there.

Wishing you a virus-free time!

7

nods Well aware. I always check to see what the files are before deleting them. In this case they were just a link to Microsoft Sam that I had put on my old desktop so definitely no harm there.

Already set the boot scan to automatically move files to the virus chest (SO glad I don’t need to be asked every time! I prefer to run virus scans when I sleep so needing to be asked every time a virus is found is problematic).