Sunday, September 23, 2012

Mitigating the FBI Green DOT MoneyPak Virus

This was quite bothersome virus which froze the screen with its own screen purporting to be from FBI warning you of some dire consequences, unless you send $100 to them on recieving which they will unclock your computer.

I got this on my Laptop which was dual boot Win7/Win8. I could access Win8 but not WIn7. Win7 got infected.

The first thing I tried was to restore it to an earlier point. I chose a point some 3 days earlier to the day I encountered this frozen screen. It did not do any good. It came right back.
I searched the web here and there. At least I knew it was a scam. I did read someone got so scared he was contemplating committing suicide, may be he was doing something illegal and felt that he may be caught.

Then I got hold of Norton 360 6.0 and scanned the whole system on the Win7 side. It had no clue. It found some 7 non-consequential cookies which it removed. I called up Norton and chatted for a while. Well, they told me that Norton 360 6.0 should do the job but they would provide a technicain with whose help I could remove the bug. The cost was $99.99 for this service. I was not prepared to part with the money and I wanted to try other options. I also downloaded few others, but I was not quite sure they would do the job.

These are some related sites where you may find some help:
http://www.spywareremove.com/removefbigreendotmoneypakvirus.html
http://www.zimbio.com/Remove+Malware/articles/9kb7G7Lpj5K/Uninstall+FBI+Green+Dot+Moneypak+Virus+Effective
http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-360/MoneyPak-FBI-virus-Green-Dot/td-p/808830

My advice, forget about Norton, don't pay them $99.99 not even $9.99, send me a $1 for my advice.

If anyone is interested I can provide the transcript of the chat.
Here is my fix:
I went back and restored the computer to a date in August 2012. It's gone and I am rid of that ransomeware. MSFT has a good thing in its SYSTEM Restore.

BTW, when you choose to restore choose the OS that is infected, in case you have multi-os on your computer.

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