I think I just got a virus from a Tom's Hardware thread.

[puglet]

I was browsing the system builds section of the forum and clicked on one thread (link below). The second I clicked it I had popups telling me my computer was infected, a rogue malware program named "AntiVir Pro" had installed itself and I could no longer open any programs or visit any webpages.

I rebooted and managed to run SpyBot before the process for AntiVir Pro could kick in. I let it run and removed 3 entries with names like "Fraud" and "Malware". I removed the entries and the virus seemed to get shut down. I'm not sure if it's still present on my system or not and I'm running more scans now to check.

My concern and the reason for posting this is that it happened as a direct result of opening a thread here at Tom's Hardware. It doesn't seem like a very resilient or damaging virus and it seems easy enough to remove so if anyone could check it out and see if this is just a weird coincidence or a major security breach at Toms Hardware.

The thread did have 16 replies so other people mustn't have had the problem I did which lead me to think it might have been deployed through the advert system perhaps?

!!WARNING!! CLICK AT OWN RISK:
http/www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/291398-13-1600-euro-gaming-choosing-parts

 

[Mousemonkey]

I've just had a look at that thread and got no alerts from my browser or AV.

 

[buwish]

Same result here. The thing about that darned AV Pro malware is that you can get it almost anywhere. I've got it a few times on or at least that's when it pops up, while on major news sites. My guess is that it somehow embeds in the ad scripts of some sites, but then again, I'm no expert.

If it comes back, there is a registry edit you can do, as well as running a malware scan in safe mode (which you have done).