Google tips? RED ALERT, never consider them!!!

Written by Pavan Kumar on July 15, 2008

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Lots of discussion is going on throughout the internet regarding online security. A forum topic on bleepingcomputer.com catched my interest and I would like to inform all my readers about that considering the security of all internet users. Coming to the topic, have you ever seen Google tips appearing on Google home page? No, never, throughout my journey in internet, I have never noticed anything other than the search box, some text and sometimes a special Google logo based on occations and in very rare and lucky cases some fuzzy things while they experiment.

Today I am discussing about a very important thing which all of you need to be aware of. While you browse through your IE browser and on some sites, you will find a tip that your antivirus 2009 software is not registered and you need to register to keep your PC secure. Did you ever see that? If yes, you are infected. Take a look at the following screenshot.

The advertisement is a link which leads you to a harmful site http://microsoft [dot] browserprotectioncenter [dot] com. Which, when I tried to visit, my antivirus software blocked that stating it to be a harmful site. To make you all clear, it is not a site which belongs to microsoft. But it is under a domain browserprotectioncenter.com and the above url is a subdomain on this domain. Usually newbies will not notice that it is some site not administrated by microsoft. Thanks for antivirus softwares and also firefox which save us from many such threats.

And if you visit that site, you will notice some warning that your system is infected with a serious threat which can only be cleaned by registered version of antivirus 2009 which can be obtained by paying some handsome amount. Many such threats may be found online and many are emerging.

Hats off to the creator of such a most misguiding hack/ hijack.

Solution: Uninstall instructions for antivirus 2009.

BTW, WordPress silently released its new version 2.6. I don’t want to bug you all by telling what’s new in that. If you are a novice and don’t want to take risk in upgrading it. You may consider this easy tutorial to upgrade wordpress.

Via Bleeping Computer forum.

Antivirus 2009 attacking mode.

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Category: computer, internet

Tags: annoyances, computer, google, threats, windows

11 Readers responded to this post

Luckily, my PC has not been infected by this. But if it does, i will know where to look. Although i got infected by something similar recently.

By Madhur Kapoor on July 16th, 2008 at 12:09 am

@ Madhur

Lots of threats are found today.. and they are increasing in number.. We need to be careful on our each and every step on the internet.

By Pavan Kumar on July 16th, 2008 at 7:22 am

Damn this is almost undetectable and misguiding Malware Infection method

By BlogsDNA on July 16th, 2008 at 9:24 am

Hey, I never saw such a tip on Google.com
Actually, my PC was infected by such an adware recently and I had format since none of the Anti’s could remove it.
It loads as the PC boots.

By Rohit on July 16th, 2008 at 9:36 am

Wat ? Are u serious :O I agree their was some problem while using IE 7,it used to redirect to some nonsense site asking for installation of antivirus but a TIP under google search engine is not worth believing..If you see the screenshot closely then their is a kind of weird code… I have higlighted this http://img27.picoodle.com/img/img27/4/7/15/f_WATm_ab6e661.png This is certainly not true…

By Rockstar Sid on July 16th, 2008 at 10:07 am

@ BlogsDNA
It is the most intelligent kind of infection I have seen.

@ Rohit
Check if your system has C:\Windows\System32\winsrc.dll, this file will be installed with antivirus 2009 and starts itself with internet explorer. I don’t think this can be found on FF. Did you check out the link I have provided for uninstalling antivirus 2009.

@ Sid
Nice find… I don’t think that the image is fake. As I noticed the label Internet in the status bar of the internet explorer browser. May be that weird code is also inserted by that adware….

By Pavan Kumar on July 16th, 2008 at 12:54 pm

Yeah, that has happened to me many times, i have ignored it so many time and that has cause me formatting my computer twice a month.

By Asif on July 18th, 2008 at 8:47 am

Never fell for that one, but your post title is good advice, especially on the DP webmaster forum.

By Rob on July 25th, 2008 at 8:04 am

These malware are sure trapping innocent web surfers.
Thanks.

By Webtools & Tips on July 26th, 2008 at 1:32 pm

@ Asif
Oops… its an alarm for all of us.

@ Rob
Thanks for appreciation, its my duty to alert my tech friends online.

@ Web tools n tips
Surely they infect the systems, but most us don’t have online money to pay for such traps.

By Pavan Kumar on July 26th, 2008 at 6:53 pm

THANK YOU! Thank you for providing a straightforward answer and solution to my problem with google search engine!
MJ