Tonight I had a problem that's fits into the description of "a small thing you have to know". When I arrived at the workstation, I saw a fake anti-virus programm that looked like a real one. But that wasn't the worst part, the programm said the workstation was infected with a lot of differend virusses and it was willing to delete them when I donated 10 dollar....

Believe it or not, just this message deliveres a whole lot of money to the owners. Such companies mostly operate from countries where legislation is not yet adapted to this type of crime and things can not be tackled.

Enough about this, we should talk about the safe mode of Windows. In order to tackle the problem mentioned above, I had to boot the workstation in safe mode boot. Unfortunately, the virus prevented me from doing this (unless I paid the 10 dollar)...

I booted the computer again in safe mode boot, but choose for "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" at the starting screen. After some rattle appeared a screen with the "good old Microsoft-DOS command prompt". When you give the "Explorer" command in the command window, the graphical interface of Windows will start, without the fake virus programm this time. 

Once the GUI was started I could eventually take action to remove the fake virus ...

Afdrukken