Before Disaster Strikes

I recently got a call from a friend that visited a web-site and wound up with a fake security alert program. Her computer slowed way down and kept giving pop-ups telling her she was infected and urging her to buy the program to clean it up. Not a big problem as the fake program is easily detected and cleaned by MBAM (available HERE). Unfortunately, she didn't have MBAM installed and when she downloaded and installed it, the fake program deleted the MBAM.EXE on installation (the security alert program was very good at protecting itself). If MBAM were already installed, the fake program would have been unable to do that. Again, not a big problem. I sent her a re-named EXE in a zip file. It just needed to be extracted to the MBAM Program folder and double clicked to run MBAM. Of course she didn't have a third party zip program and Windows native compression wouldn't allow her to extract the file (blocked for security). For some reason, she couldn't unblock it. Once again, not a big problem. She downloaded and installed 7-ZIP (available HERE)and extracted the EXE, ran the program and cleaned the problem. This was after several hours of work dealing with a slow computer and annoying "YOU ARE INFECTED" pop-ups. It could have been dealt with fairly simply if the needed programs were already in place. The lesson learned is to not wait until the middle of a problem to get the necessary things to deal with it.