There are dangerous things floating around the internet today.  I come across a lot of different computer viruses on friends and relatives computers while working on them.  Recently I came across one called hijack ware.

Hijack ware more or less hijacks the functionality of your computer and only lets your click on an option to fix the problem.  Then when you click this option, it will take you to a website where you pay money to have the attack stopped.  This will look like it is an Anti virus program that will stop the attack.  In reality, the antivirus program is the attack.

After battling one computer with this going on, I’ve learned a few things.  This will take place by having a small pop up run behind your browser window.  It will look just like a window on your computer and show a program doing a virus scan.  It will say something about a virus is found, click to remove.  That’s where they get you.  It really installs the trojan horse on your computer which locks up all your current windows and can disable your current anti-virus program.  Worse yet it will lock out your task manager, so there is no way to have this program stop running.  The only thing that is working on your desktop is this popup saying to stop the attack, go buy some program.  At that point your computer is hijacked.

I did some searching around the web about this and saw some sites that talked about restarting in safe mode.  Then they said you could download some patch.  Nothing seemed to work for me.

Here is what did work for me.  Since I was trying to fix a computer and make it functional again, I was able to use it as my guinea pig.  I restarted the computer in safe mode, then just did a simple system restore.  Sure its not the most in depth fix, but it worked and in 30 min the computer was up and running.  Actually if you came across this article, create a system restore point now incase your computer does catch one of these hijack ware programs.  Or go out and buy your self a mac ;o)