Horrible Trojan Software: Help Please?

[Trobby]

Alright, so I now have, for the second time ever, a Trojan program trying to take over my computer. When I boot it up, a "Security Tool" tries to tell me that every program under the sun is infected with some sort of worm and that it's trying to steal my "credit card information", which pretty much says to me "I'm pretending to be good software so I can steal your money". It seems to even work in conjunction with Windows Defender to fool my computer into thinking it's genuine software.

Right now, I'm running AVG to scan my whole computer, but I'm not sure if it will help. This is a Windows XP computer, roughly 5 years old, and I haven't been visiting any sites that are unusual.

One annoying thing that was happening just before I restarted the computer was Internet Explorer, while I'm using Firefox, would generate pop-ups out of nowhere.

Hopefully I won't really need any help with this, but can anyone offer some advice for this? Would it help to uninstall Windows Defender, or any other old virus scanning software I might have? Or should I definitely not do that?

Thank you in advance.

[RS14]

Make backups, wipe it clean, and do a reinstall. After 5 years, it's probably not a bad idea anyway, and it's faster and more reliable than anything else you can do.

[littlequietguy]

It would be funny if clicking on this thread gave you a trojan virus. I hypothesize a comedy sketch in the making.

[bluewind95]

HijackThis combined with googling anything you can't immediately recognize should help with most virus issues. Be aware, though, that you have to get into system properties and disable Windows's restore, otherwise, it will simply restore the virus. You can turn it back on when the computer is safe.

[Trobby]

Well, I need a new computer anyway, but hopefully this will give me enough time to get a new one in place.

Thanks for the help, guys. :smallwink: