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Author Topic: Must've Picked Up a Virus Somewhere
Robert Nowall
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The past several months I've been plagued by this site that pops up whenever I go online. Tells me my "Trend Micro" is no longer supported and offers me a chance to purchase coverage for nineteen-ninety-five.

Now, despite what you may have heard, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I'd never heard of "Trend Micro" before this, though it does seem to be a legitimate company and product. Nor does it seem to be part of the Norton 360 stuff I actually did buy and do use---a nuisance in itself in many way, but that's beside the point.

Legitimate or not---anybody have an idea how I can get rid of it?


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DWD
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If your Task Manager shows a running process for bnscrgdm.exe, it's a virus:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic138237.html


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jayazman
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Trend Micro is a real company. Seems you have some adware on your computer. If your Norton is up to date, you could have it do a virus scan, it should pick up any adware also...
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Pyre Dynasty
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It sounds like XP Police Anti-Virus which is kinda a virus itself. It basically shuts down your computer till you buy thier "anti-virus" software. Try a register cleaner, or google the thing and you'll probably find step by step way to remove it.

Or you could report it to Norton and see what they have to say about it.


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Robert Nowall
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Well, it's a start.
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Zero
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Norton eats more memory and CPU than most spyware/adware/malware it's designed to protect against. And it stamps its yellow logo everywhere that it doesn't belong.

If you're computer savvy it's much better to just have a boot disc and know how to manually remove things.


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DWD
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Zero, I'm with you on Norton stuff. It is unbelievably greedy about system resources, and in general is just very poorly written bloatware.

For the last couple of years I've been using F-Prot Antivirus from a software company in Iceland. It's reliable, has a small footprint, and is very inexpensive--I think about $25 US per year for a 5-seat home license last time I renewed. But there are even free products out there that I would choose over Norton, even if the latter came bundled with my computer. The laptop I use now came with it, and uninstalling it was the very first thing I did. It's that bad. Really.

Guess all that's an aside, though, as it doesn't exactly help Robert. Any updates, Robert? Progress? Sounds like a very old virus version given the date you said it mentions (1995). A lot of times I've seen this happen when a person uses an old diskette or other storage device that's been sitting for years. (Oooh... story idea...) :-)


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Robert Nowall
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Nineteen ninety-five was the price quote, not the date...it does seem to be the kind of thing described at Bleeping Computer, though it doesn't resemble their picture...I couldn't find anything on my computer related to XP Police Anti-Virus or "bnscrgdm.exe," but I might be searching wrong...as I said, Norton is a lot of trouble, maybe more than it's worth...as of the last time I checked, it says it's updating, but I might be reading it wrong...and what I don't know about computers could fill a manual.
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Zero
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You could always hit it with something lighter like Windows Defender. Might or might not help. But at least such programs don't have to be actively running in the background gobbling up resources at the rate of the army with the overall effectiveness of the minutemen.
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DWD
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quote:
Nineteen ninety-five was the price quote, not the date...

DOH - leave it to a software guy to default to the most unlikely meaning. Thank yewww, I'm here all week, try the veal...


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DWD
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Robert,

This is a decent free spyware detection tool. It does a pretty good job of finding popup-type malware.

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html


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Zero
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I'd like someone to do a professional analysis comparing the memory demands of actively running antivirus softwares Norton, McAfee, etc, to an average sampling of spyware.

[This message has been edited by Zero (edited June 09, 2009).]


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