I hate Windows

Yesterday I got called to a neighbor's house because his Vista machine had been infected with Antivirus 360. This is a nasty piece of malware that infects your browser and then informs you that every web page you visit is infected with a virus. When you hit Google, it rewrites the page to make it seem that Google itself has detected a problem on your system and that Google recommends you buy Antivirus 360 to fix the problem.

Gawd, I hate Windows! In fairness this particular piece of junk is spread through plugins (QuickTime, Adobe). However, Microsoft Defender doesn't prevent it or detect it after it is installed and neither did his Norton A/V. As I said, I hate Windows.

I was able to boot in Safe Mode with Networking and get Firefox downloaded. I then used that to research this crap and found plenty of pages giving removal instructions. Unfortunately, they were all wrong - apparently the creators of this junk have seen all those pages that would interfere with their scam, so they have changed the names of files and registry keys. I couldn't find anything that had more current information, so I went to System Restore.

I first tried going back to yesterday, but the system was still infected then. Not wanting to spend the day on this, I rolled it back two weeks and it came up clean.

OK, fine. But you know it will happen again. I hate Windows.