You say you’re wiping your drive and reinstalling. If what you mean by that is that you’re “formatting” the drive and reinstalling, then the virus will not survive that. If you’re simply telling the windows installer to reinstall over an existing Windows, that may not get rid of the virus.
Assuming you are formatting the drive.... it could also be located on a second hard disk, if you have one. Though you’d have to execute it yourself for that to happen once you have reinstalled windows.
Or... you’re browsing the internet with IE and allowing it to run Java/Flash/Active x/etc, and being reinfected when you visit the wrong web page. Suggest using FireFox and the NoScript plugin for that.
I got attacked by the virus or ‘scam’ ‘Personal Security’. I couldn’t move on the PC without the big red sign covering the screen, ‘Your computer has been infected...buy our virus protection, etc.’ This appeared right back no matter how many times you deleted the thing.
After trying for hours and scanning my PC with everything I could think of, (including MalwareBytes) I found this on the net:
“The program doesn’t let you download any software. We sent a message to the company that created Personal Security on the “customer service” link that we would track them down and sue them for attacking our kids computer. They emailed this solution and it worked in less than one minute. We still downloaded and ran an antispyware program afterwards to make sure nothing remained. This was their response which worked:
“Dear customer,
Thank you for contacting Customer Support Center.
Please follow my instructions to uninstall the program:
Paste the following string to Windows Explorer address bar and execute it (Press Enter key):
C:\Program Files\Common Files\PSecurityUninstall\Uninstall
or
1. Open My computer, choose Disk C;
2. Find Program Files=>Common Files=>PSecurityUninstall=>Uninstall
3. Run the file Uninstall.lnk
After that our product will be removed.Sometimes it takes more than one try to remove the product due to temporary technical difficulties, so please try to do it several times.
If you have any questions concerning our software, please contact our Customer Support Service.
With best wishes,
Customer Support Team”
___________
It worked the first time for me.