Abnow.com is an awfully annoying online entity. You are probably wondering how come a decent-looking website like that could possibly be noxious. As a matter of fact, the domain itself is not problematic. It’s the traffic driving technique that is causing a fuss of indignation on different security boards on the web. The issue here is you normally won’t visit Abnow.com unless there’s a little rootkit or trojan horse inside your personal computer. Although tiny and not always detectable, this infection can make most of your Internet browsing activities go down the drain. Here is how the scheme tends to manifest itself: the piece of badware infiltrates your machine through some exploit, a software vulnerability of other stealthy path. Then, it modifies a number of specific system settings that are directly associated with web surfing. If this bad plan gets through, you will be hitting Abnow.com each time you try to find something on a search engine you use. Also, the default home page on your browser may get changed to Abnow.com, and no matter how many times you put the right URL back in there – it will continue getting modified over and over. So this virus apparently causes huge complications for your browsing. How do you fix it? It’s pretty simple – you need to use a tool that identifies this rootkit and has plenty of expertise to eradicate it from your PC. A more detailed set of instructions is below, so read it carefully and stick to the steps outlined.

Antivirus Smart Protection is definitely not a safe piece of software. Although its interface has a little notice in the top right-hand corner reading ‘Genuine Microsoft Software’, that does not mean anything that you might trust. What is more, this affiliation with the reputable software development company is completely fictitious. Antivirus Smart Protection is actually a counterfeit antispyware tool created by criminals – the ones who try to make money the easy way. They plant the latent installer for their scam product on different web resources so that users unknowingly let it in. Having passed through the initial adaptation phase on your computer, the fraudware imitates a scan that always returns results similar to what you can see on the screenshot (click to enlarge). It claims to detect critical malware problems impersonated by trojan horses mostly. Once you click the ‘Remove All’ button there, you get redirected to Antivirus Smart Protection activation page offering you a purchase of the license for 6 months up to lifetime, the price ranging from $49.95 to $89.95. Now, read the following carefully: do not let this junk trick you into wasting your money. The program is a fake, so the workaround is to remove it once and forall using a real cleaner. See more details below.

Here comes another actively rotated domain maintaining the fraudulent traffic-and-click business. It’s hosted at Hooot.com – a fairly well designed web page with an innocent face but malicious essence deep down. Why is this hijacker dangerous and how does it manifest itself? You probably know a part of the answers to these questions as you might be redirected to that page once in a while. It either replaced your default home page or pops up from genuine search engine results when you try find something there. This usually happens due to internal PC issues rather than some external influence. You see, there is this virus (or rootkit) that infects computer with a distinct intension to render your browsing handicapped. This pest forces your web-surfing to refer to scam sites like Hooot.com so that the bad guys get revenue out of this illegally obtained traffic – it’s all simple actually. However, this definitely is a problem that needs handling. All you need to do for restoring normal browser activity is stick to the instruction below. It makes sense to note that the manual way is not always efficient though because you are dealing with a rootkit, i.e. a threat that is really good at hiding in different system locations.

Internet Security 2012 is rogue by classification and deceitful by nature. This application can easily bypass your security measures and install itself on your computer without any approval on your end. This fact gives the scareware an advantage of unexpectedness and wins it some time for preliminary system modifying activity to get implemented. Once inside your PC and active, Internet Security 2012 runs a scan shortly after Windows is launched. This scanner (see attached image) shows you that your system is in great danger. The program reports a huge number of parasites and recommends you get rid of them by purchasing its license and further activating the full version of the software. However, the only thing that will actually happen if you do so is the threats that the scan had come up with will vanish, but there’s a trick there. The scan results returned by Internet Security 2012 are bogus to the bone. Therefore elimination of the infections is just fiction because they never were on your PC in the first place. So you should urgently uninstall Internet Security 2012 malware instead of purchasing it for pseudo removal of inexistent viruses.

If Smart Protection 2012 could possibly perform the declared antivirus functions, it would probably make a good security client. But its only likeness with AV software is the user interface and some graphical components imitating the malware scanning and deleting activity. The rest are differences that actually start with the way Smart Protection 2012 appears in your computer. It gets delivered by a trojan horse that lurks in some files generally available online. Another way of distribution is through exploits, i.e. weak spots of one’s Operating System and some software in particular. The ‘welcome’ signal of this badware is usually its scan that tends to pop up at the beginning of each Windows session. This way, the program attempts to show the user how much it ‘cares’ about the health of the PC. In fact, it only mimics the virus check and reports some absurd threats that are not on the computer at all. Based on this brainwashing, the rogue suggests that you buy its commercial copy and let it handle the infections. That’s the fraud technique you should recognize at once and do something about it. Removal is the right method of treating Smart Protection 2012 scam.

There has been an interesting cyber security phenomenon taking place since yesterday. A rogue antispyware application called Security Defender appears to have come back to life after an almost one-year break. That’s right, it was early February 2011 that this program was first detected or heard of, and now it’s back. Honestly, that’s not something ordinary for scareware industry. Regardless of the reasons for this, let’s see how bad it is. Actually, almost nothing has changed – the app looks the same and still does the same things. It infects computers under different disguises, for example the trojan may hide in some files that look perfectly safe to download on the web. Once it’s in, there will be some basic files adding followed by a massive brain attack upon the user. Security Defender displays a scan each time you log into Windows. The scanner reports nothing but multiple threats that are incompatible with secure use of your PC. Be advised though that these infections are fictitious, and they are only intended to scare you into doing the next thing which is so much anticipated by the hackers – purchasing the license for the product. Buy not only should you refrain from buying Security Defender’s full version, it’s as well strongly recommended to get rid of this fraud at once.

Trojan Horse Hider.OOW is probably one of the trickiest infections residing at large presently. The problem is it’s not recognized by some antivirus applications to be malicious, or it might actually be detected but denied to be removed. There is a clear explanation to that fact. Trojan Horse Hider.OOW tends to integrate itself within some critical system processes under Windows/system32/drivers/ directory. Some reported examples of such infected files are mrxsmb.sys and dfsc.sys. Therefore, even if the pest gets spotted by a security client and deemed harmful, a problem will occur with its elimination because those files are important for the system to work right. Even if you venture to delete the file and replace it with its backup copy made in advance, it will come up infected again. By the way, performing those sorts of manual manipulations with your system is a bad idea as it may lead to an OS failure in the long run. The workaround here is to use an automatic tool that spots the trojan and deletes it without actually affecting the significant system information. The antivirus program available through the links below is capable of disinfecting the critical files and keeping them intact all the way as the cleaning procedure is performed.