Recent XP Antivirus 2008 Infections Stealing Data. Are You Protected!
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I had probably one of the worst client calls of my career that other day. When I arrived to David's house I immediatly saw the XP Antivirus 2008 infection and though...sweet, "i'll be outta here in a few minutes"..boy was I ever wrong.
David had the latest generation of the XP Antivirus 2008 trojan...it's a very nasty bundle of rogue antivirus and data stealing applications. David's Quicken and Turbo tax files were being uploaded to various sites around the world on a non-stop basis (until we yanked his ethernet cable out). How did I observe this? I used process monitor from Microsoft and my own network monitor.
David was just blown away and completely freaked out. I was too. I couldn't believe how easy it is to steal and passout someones identity and financial records.
I told David to sign up with the same identity protection service my wife and I use. LifeLock.
Lifelock ensures you that if your identity is ever stolen it's pretty much useless, because the thieves can't open any:
-loans in your name
-credit cards in your name
-basically anything in your name!!!
the moment they try, you'll get a phone call on every phone you have registered with LifeLock. The lifelock operator then asks you if you are trying to buy a car (for example)...you say "nope!"...then the car loan is halted and the thief looks pretty dam stupid 
I'll be promoting LifeLock on my blog because i really believe in it. 90% of my malware calls are related to identity theft in some fasion (rogue antivirus or data uploaders).
To finish the story...I removed XP Antivirus 2008 and all the other malware (such as the rootkit and data stealers) by using my bootable anti-malware disc. Once the malware was removed David decided to buy KAV 2009 for future protection.
You may be curious to know that David was using Mcafee...ouch.
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Comments
Haven’t seen anything like it, here in Denmark, where I’m from. But I guess/hope it will come soon. By the way, nice site you have here. 
Whoops, I forgot to tell everyone how I got rid of it. I had to use my bootable anti-malware disc. Avira (on the bootable disc) was able to find everything and then delete it.
After the bootable scan David decided to buy KAV 2009 for future protection.
I love boot CD’s. Avira is my second favourite. Bitdefender is my favourite because it has a lovely GUI, web browser, and it can even update itself, so you only need to download it once, where as with Avira, there are several new versions a day.
http://www.bitdefender.com/KB417-world–Using-the-BitDefender-Rescue-CD.html
Wow James! Thanks for providing us all such a great link! I’m going to try it out on my client tonight.
Hey Matt, thought you might want to know this.
Yesterday when I attempted to connect to YOUR youtube, if gave me a 404 error, so I checked to see if internet was buggy or if youtube was having probs but no, other profiles loaded perfectly. Looks like your youtube got dos’d.
YO Matt
why are you opend a poll and vote the super antispyware its not an anti virus???
only anti spyware…
A boon for hard workers
I remember how my files and programs used to get crashed due to the various Spywares and all my hard work would be in vain. I had to waste a lot of my time re -doing my files. Then I came to know about search-and-destroy. It has proved to be a boon for me and my hard work is no more in vain
Well, LifeLock isn’t for us non US dudes, but I’ll bet it’s worth every penny