Virus!

My home PC has become infected with a virus, "Malware Defense". Being a manly man and all I don't run an active virus scanner; slows down the computer too much and I know better so as to not get a virus. Crap!

Maybe it's better classified as malware, not a virus (obvious from it's name, no?). It doesn't seem to do anything much to affect my daily activities (email, surfing, flash games). What it does is prevent/redirect my browser (chrome) from displaying any anti-virus/spyware pages.

Fortunately, I have a netbook in the house (Asus Eee PC 900A), so I used that to go to the removal pages and download a few tools (Malwarebytes Anti-Malware).

My home PC is still running Windows XP (currently prepping it to move to Win7, but that's a future post). I booted into safe mode, removed a bunch of reg entries manually (following those listed on the removal page), ran the Mbam tool and all looked good.

I rebooted and it looked ok; I could hit those web pages. So, that was that for the night.