Free Antivirus that prevents Moneypak virus?

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gggirlgeek

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I am a volunteer technician. I have come across the Monkeypak virus 2 times in the last 2 months (the FBI popup that demands a large fine.). Both were on very slow netbooks. I had put free Panda cloud on them hoping for good protection with little slow-down. It allowed Moneypak to get through. Unacceptable.

I have used Avast and AVG on larger machines but they seem bulky and slow on netbooks. However, it's worth it if my Newbie clients insist on surfing dodgy sites. I don't know if they work in this case though. No clear answers in Google.

Does anyone know of a free way to block Moneypak?
 

n1ghtr4v3n

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You may want to try BitDefender. I read very good reviews about it. And I switched all my systems from Avast to BitDefender. So far so good. It actually catches stuff that Avast was failing to do so.
I hope it helps.
 

gggirlgeek

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Interesting answer. I didn't expect that. i might give bitdefender a try on my own system and see before I install it on clients' computers.

As far as blocking Moneypak though, is there a way to test it? Maybe there's a website setup for techies to test antivirus software? I can boot to my other hard drive and simply reformat when the tests fail.
 

n1ghtr4v3n

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there are some test-aimed virus' applications but not sure if its available for MoneyPack. Not really familiar myself. But it is for sure "safer" than Avast in general. It is told to be safer than any other Free-Security anyways... Plus, its actually a huge plus, it is freaking LITE-Weight lol
 

gggirlgeek

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I really need to find out about Moneypak. It's the first virus that's ever gotten by me, and I haven't been able to find anyone else who says they've blocked it. It's kind of scarey.

It freezes up the entire computer, takes a picture of you with your webcam, and then pops up a full-screen page demanding money (with your picture on it.) It also accuses you of child pornography. Upon reboot, all you see is the same page. When I removed it with Malwarebytes, it had also reassociated Explorer.exe with it's own program so the computer was not completely restored until I fixed this manually.

I find it hard to believe FBI Moneypak has been around for a year and most AV's can't block things like accessing the webcam, or changing the Registry entries for Explorer.exe. Seems like pretty basic stuff.
 

gggirlgeek

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I need to get this netbook back to the client so, for now, I have installed Avast 6 (Avast 7 and 8 slow the computer a lot!) AVG is a beast as well.

I will test Bitdefender on my own system because it sounds interesting but I don't trust it yet.

Newbies don't know what dodgy pop-ups or websites look like. So it's almost impossible to educate them until they've had some experience around the web. It's really frustrating. I used to be able to install a good antivirus and send them on their way.
 

adamsfl

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I know first-hand that Avast (even the paid version) does NOT prevent moneypak. We've found the fastest way to get rid of it is, if you must go to "dodgy sites" use a non-administrator log-in on your computer, then when you get it, go into Safe mode and delete the user, do a thorough scan (Avast Boot Scan) and then create a new non-admin user. don't save any user data in the non-admin user.

However, we would REALLY like something that stops it from getting in in the first place. Unfortunately, for our work, we have to go to "dodgy sites" and we're getting moneypaks almost daily now.
 

gggirlgeek

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Sorry I forgot to get back to this question.

Bitdefender was terrible. The free version doesn't have any settings or exclusions that can be changed. It also has a bad habit of deleting files it marks as viruses without allowing you to recover them from a vault. Unacceptable.

For now I have installed Avast version 6 on my new clients' computers, and I do not allow it to update the program. This is the last version that seems pretty resource friendly. I haven't tried the 2013 or new 2014 yet.
 
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