Matt-

Our netbook caught the Win 7 Antivirus 2012 bug also. It happened a few days ago and it blocked all executable programs (including the antivirus program), and requested payment of $69.99 to get "rid" of the infection. Our antivirus program on the netbook is the free Avira (recommended by Consumer Reports). None of our other PC computer (both running Norton Internet Security 2012) were infected.

I asked some IT experts at work, and they suggested a simple solution (which worked):

Boot up in Safe Mode (hit F8 when powering up the computer), then restore to an earlier restoration point. I did it and all traces of that Antivirus 2012 bug disappeared. I then did a system scan and it could not detect the virus.

Have you tried this solution yet?

 

That's what I did when my netbook got hit a few months ago. Not sure if it was the same bug.

 

On top of MS Essentials and Malwarebytes......

Make sure you back up your system drive every few days......

That way when (not if) get hit with a worm/virus/whatever, you can restore your system drive real quick, and really not lose much if anything.

External drives have gotten so cheap over the years, or throw in another hard drive if it is a desktop PC.... very easy to do....

 

I suspect that Malwarebytes will be able to remove the worm for free.

 

As Arnold said: "I'm back" with my desk top PC. Unfortunately, I had to take my Dell Studio XPS back to the out of the box (new born baby) configuration to get it back up and working. The good news is that I do have a 1 TB external drive so I did not loose anything of importance (I hope).

I want to publicly thank Noam Katz of Internet Brands for his assistance and patience in this matter. He was more helpful than the folks at McAfee that wanted to charge me a fee of $89.00 to fix what they let get broken by not catching the Win 7 2012 bug to begin with.

to Noam.

Thank you for all of your help.

Matt

 

^I'm glad you're back, Matt!

 

 

Unfortunately, this version of the mutated Win 7 2012 was able to out smart Malwarebytes and would not let me run it.

 

Thank you Patty and Gene.

The Plant Pixie and I have been going through some S2Ki withdrawal. Thankfully, we will be attending the MWG next week to get our "friend fix". Sorry that you will not be there Patty. Maybe Ken and set up a Skype link so that you can join us via the Internet?

 

My Son's laptop just got hit by this virus about a week ago. While Malwarebytes would not run when the OS was in normal mode, restoring to a previous checkpoint via safemode allowed Malwarebytes to run and remove it. I should note that Security Essentials did not find it on a full scan while Malwarebytes did.

It's a shame you had to reset to the factory setting.