My sister-in-law called last week. She was being prompted to renew her anti-virus – the machine had a long expired Norton AV on it – but the renewal prompts had “Cyber Security” on them.
A quick web search set off some warning bells and I suggested she just turn off the PC and drop it off so that I might take a closer look.
I powered it up this morning. First thing that greeted me was this:
Sure looks like the Windows Security Center, doesn’t it? Yet it is the “Cyber Protection Center” instead. Not a good sign! The Norton AV was there and running but disabled (and still long expired).
I looked around a bit and turned up a nice little Cyber Security Removal Guide over at bleepingcomputer.com. I followed the guide and it seems to have done the job — Malwarebyte’s Anti Malware provides the heavy lifting. I’ve had a lot of good luck with that app this year.
Once it seemed clean I booted into safe mode and ran a few more scans with a few more utilities just to be sure. I think we’re good.
I next removed the old Norton and installed Microsoft’s Security Essentials and boxed it all back up. Hopefully she can get a few more months out of this trusty old Celeron laptop.
Obligatory Disclaimer: you want to keep in mind that there’s never a 100% guarantee on complete malware removal – there can be too many variants. If you have the time – and all the original OS and app media – backing up the user data and then formatting and reloading clean is always a better option.
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November 1st, 2009 
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Where do you stand on the idea of changing default desktop theme to something other than default so that these fake windows are the wrong color?
I’m a fan of that. It definitely weeds out the low-rent browser popups that go borderless and then fake the default crayola colors.