Smitfraud Information

Smitfraud (and it's associated variants) are a family of spyware/malware programs that I have been finding on a lot of systems recently. Unfortunatly, it also bears the dubious distinction of being very difficult to remove or protect against.

Smitfraud is one of a new breed of malware programs which cannot be removed by either Ad-Aware or Spybot (even when both are used in combination). It cannot be removed automatically by any known antivirus program either. The only successful method for removal (that I know of) is to use the Smitfraud Removal Tool from Safe Mode.

Smitfraud and it's evil brethren can usually be identified by thier "signature" attack -- they will usually load a flashing icon down by the taskbar which will try to take you to a place to BUY software to fix a spyware or virus infection. They are trying to pretend to be Microsoft's security center application, but the fact that they take you to a site to buy someone-else's software is usually a dead giveaway. Many of the variants will change the background, alter homepages, and pop up warning bubbles stating that the system is infected, has a security risk, or that running spyware has been detected. You can read more about Smitfraud here.

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