That particular piece of scareware can be a very tenacious little piece of garbage. Read all the above posts. Disabling the network adapter, booting in safe-mode and scanning are your best first efforts. Failing that, it will require more effort. Do you have your anti-malware, anti-virus set to auto-update? Are they set to “real time” scan of all traffic? Last time I had this on a machine, it took several hours and three attempts to eradicate it. Then, I locked the machine down and dumded-down my kids’ user privileges.
A few months ago, my husband’s laptop, running AVG paid with all the extras, was infected with one of those ransomware viruses. Nothing at all worked, as the thing had immediately inserted itself into AVG.
After a few days of frustration, he went to Geek Squad. They fixed it and the $200 charge includes a package for all our machines whenever they are in need. They see it all the time and it is evidently a PITA to remove/repair. Not sure, but I think they finally just gave him a new hard drive, but they were able to transfer everything, so nothing except bookmarks were lost.
We also back up to external drives often, separate drives for things like Quick Books, so we lost nothing.
BYW, the site where he was infected was the forum for Ferfal’s Living in Argentina. I’ve been afraid to access it on my computer since.
What good does running your anti-virus scans in safe mode do? Doesn't it just do the same function in regular mode? And is that something one should do on a regular basis even tho you don't have any identifiable problem? Thanks