Has anyone else gotten that "Spyware Protect 2009" spyware/virus thing?

[marmar]

I finally got rid of the bastard after scanning, rescanning and finally finding the thing....Be on the lookout. It's a real pain in the ass.

[rucky]

1. What did you use to remove it?

[marmar]

2. My McAfee spyware scan rooted it out after three scans.

Obnoxious thing had completely taken over my web access.

[newfie11]

3. Did you get this from Spyware?

I just ran a search but don't see it on my computer. I do have spyware on it.

[marmar]

7. Here's a bit on it from Yahoo! answers:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081228121147AA0EvY0

[newfie11]

9. Thanks, I will check it out n/t

[Gman]

4. There's variations out there called Anti-Virus XP 2009

anything with XP 2009 on the name is trouble.

[tosh]

5. mr tosh is dealing with it TODAY on a network workstation

at our business! This is after getting frustrated last night and quitting.

Thankfully, the server was better protected.

[BlooInBloo]

6. I would imagine the various hijackthis forums have plenty of info on it....

One example (google knows many more):
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/forum22.html

[DireStrike]

8. It's pretty awful.

I cleaned it off of my girlfriend's computer a month or two ago. Well, sort of. I removed the virus but the damage to the operating system was so extensive that it wouldn't start anymore. Nobody gives you a disk to repair windows with anymore, so I had to do a fresh install.

Her sister had installed it in a program that claimed to be anti-spyware. I was shocked that somebody fell for that, especially somebody under 40. Well anyway she did and it wrought havoc.

The real kicker came when I tried to remove it. There is a proliferation of websites with instructions on how to remove it, most of which seem to be false! They're written in the same broken english that the program itself uses. I wonder if the virus' author had a hand in disseminating the false removal information. Very clever, if so. Made me smile, and then curse.

What I used to remove it was Malwarebytes' software: http://www.malwarebytes.org/

[Matariki]

10. Yeah that thing sucked. It was a bitch to remove.

Somebody needs to sue the company that put that into circulation.

[Q3JR4]

11. My grandparents got it and were

pissed off at it while ignoring their antivirus' attempt to remove it.

I fixed it by clicking the button on the screen AVG Antivirus put up (free version here) that said "Heal".

The next scan was completely clear.

I highly recommend the free version of AVG Antivirus, as well as spybot search and destroy.

Q3JR4
Virus and spyware free since '03.