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My Windows XP PC started acting strange and I am right now actually in Linux running off of a USB drive. I am running Avast under Linux and it has discovered some viruses on my XP drive.

Some of the strange things happening in XP were:

  • I could not get to Google.com
  • My Hosts file was set to hidden and read only
  • My Hosts file had an entry of ::1
  • And AVG had ads in it I've never seen before. Maybe it is normal but I Binged for AVG anti-virus and become.com but found no information. (The red lines and question mark are by me). So does AVG Antivirus have ads?

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Sathyajith Bhat
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user390480
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1 Answers1

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No, AVG doesn't have a virus. You've been infected by malware that's pretending to be AVG. It's not uncommon for malware to pretend to be a security tool, but this is a first time I've seen it emulate a popular antivirus program. Still, it doesn't surprise me — kind of an obvious approach really.

One approach is to roll back to a system restore point from before the infected. This kind of malware will try to prevent you from doing that, but you might be able to disable it by booting into safe mode.

But you had better prepare for the possibility that you'll have to reinstall from scratch. Has happened to me more than once.

Isaac Rabinovitch
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