Personal Antivirus is a fake or ‘rogue’ program which should be removed from your computer. Its purpose is to scare you into buying its full version, which is nothing more than a useless peice of software with no ability to find or removal any real virus infections. Personal Antivirus will try to scare you by using popups and various fake system warnings.
Personal Antivirus will cause many different kinds of negative behaviour on your computer and will result in a dramatic system slowdown.
1.Personal Antivirus contains keylogging functionality which copies all of the things that you type into your keyboard and makes this information available to the nasty authors of this virus. As you can imagine, this raw data can be used to breach your privacy and steal from you.
2.A Window and/or a system alert will appear impersonating Windows Security Center stating that you should purchase Personal Antivirus.
3.Numerous alerts stating that your computer is under attack or that you have malware running on your computer. If you click on these alerts, Personal Antivirus will be installed, or you will be brought to the purchase page for the program.
4. Strange new icons might appear on your taskbar.
5. Normal web browsing will become difficult or impossible. This is because Personal Antivirus hijacks Internet Explorer and tries to prevent you from reaching your desired webpage.
Personal Antivirus should be removed immediately from your computer. Follow the removal guide below and you won’t break into a sweat! Personal Antivirus is a resistant virus. It won’t just leave your computer if you ask it to (through the normal uninstall process in Add/Remove Programs). Manual removal is a challenge since the infection builds its new home in many different locations on your hard drive. Unless you are very experienced at virus removal, it is likely that you will leave some of the associated files and registry keys behind that will reinstall the infection at a later date (‘reinfectors’). Bearing all of this in mind, for the vast majority of computer users, an automatic removal tool will be the best option. Malwarebytes is a very effective and trusted malware removal program. Download and install the free version of this software. Run the ‘Quick Scan’. This will only take about 10 minutes or so & will automatically remove the Personal Antivirus infection. It is likely that if Personal AntiVirus was on your computer, other infections will have crept in as well. It would be wise to follow up the Malwarebytes scan with a full scan using your own existing AntiVirus software.
Stop This kind of thing happening again
1.Update all of your software. Update Windows, update Java, update Flash player! In fact update any & all software that you use. Old software often has inherent security vulnerabilities/weaknesses and these are regularly exploited by virus authors to infect your machine. Don’t give the bad guys this chance. Update now!
2. Strengthen your PCs Antivirus software. This is your main defence against infections so choose wisely. Most of the free antivirus software are struggling to provide effective protection this year.
3.Finally, if you use p2p software, ease off or stop altogether. In pracatice, a large proprotion of viruses are downloaded from the file sharing networks.
Personal Antivirus should be removed immediately from your computer. This should be followed up with further full virus scans and preventative measures need to be taken to prevent further infections. If you got infected once, your computer is not as secure as it could be.
Get more information on Personal Antivirus infection, head to http://www.personalantivirus.org.uk