Remove Personal Antivirus

Ok, my dad the careless computer user decided to install something called Personal Antivirus. Turned out it was some sort of malware designed to hijack his PC (judging from the pop-ups that continually show on his computer).

Now I know there are solutions out there, but I'm looking for a one-click/one-run solution that I can just shoot to my dad for him to run. The last thing I want to do is dictate obviously hard-to-understand instructions over the phone—or take the long roadtrip to his house. Appreciate any help peeps.

Thanks for this man! I actually sent your post to my dad, and he was able to understand them. Consider his Personal "Antivirus" program fixed!

Also, to minimize the chance of this happening again, I'm planning to buy him some AV software. AVG's paid version sounds good to me, but I've been hearing good things about Norton 2009. What do you think?

This afternoon on June 11, 2009 an uninvited Personal Antivirus program came to bluff me about my pc infected with hundreds of Trojan Virus and Worms. It asked me to buy their software to erase such Trojan Virus and Worms and it meant that I would have to disclose my credit card identity to pay for it, right? My McAfee Total Protection which I bought from my pc store in person last year to be installed in my pc had quarantined several Trojans and I was asked to remove the generic fakealerts created by the same Personal Antivirus program when I clicked on Restore stated in my McAfee Total Protection navigation column. You'd see Personal Antivirus is created by a group of hackers who is well-versed in software programming and they are out to scam everyone they could lay hand on. Please report such problem to all bloggers worldwide that such an old method of scam has emerged again and they'd always change name to avoid detection. They are the devils and they are the angels as well. Do not reveal your credit or debit card numbers to such scammers. Do not log onto other sites to look for a purchase of Trojan Removal Tools at all. Just follow my instructions first. Please inform all your banks to freeze your account for a time being without further delay if you did a mistake. It may be difficult to check where they hide their illegal program in our registry. I managed to remove their scammers' program by clicking on "Start" at the task bar to look for "Help and Support” and clicked “Undo changes to your computer with System Restore" to do time-travelling back one day when I failed to find anything in the "Control Panel" to check for Personal Antivirus icon possibly being downloaded inside "Add or Remove Programs". It was unlikely inside there because I didn't download such program at all. Please change all passwords of your Google, Yahoo, MSN and many others once you have successfully removed such scam by my suggestion of "System Restore". To prevent inconsiderate intrusion again, please enable firewall when you switch off your computer. Do not worry about your business website as the datacenter of your hosting company is protecting your online business data all the time. Be wary of more such future scams. Please spread the news to others as I did for you. You’d see, such scammers have ready Customer Support Specialist to take advantage of loophole of the International Law concerning internet matter. I threatened their “support team” and they emailed to me very soon but I had restored my system earlier back to normal. Don’t be so kind to such rude internet marketers at all. They’re simply hypocrites! They are disturbing our peace and our business with too much climbing over our heads. If they have shops selling Personal Antivirus Software, must they resort to such filthy act to create so much nonsense to tarnish the image of their own lucrative business? Believe it or not, I suspect many other software companies are willing to help you remove Personal Antivirus are themselves behind all these business tricks. Just be careful!!!

They sent me an email finally when I threatened them with something but Anna Hamilton is a fake, see below:
[#218770] Re: Personal Antivirus product inquiry
Dear customer,
Thank you for contacting Customer Support Center.
Please follow my instructions to uninstall Personal Antivirus
1.Open My computer, choose Disk C;
2.Find C:\Program Files\Common Files\Uninstall\PAV\Uninstall.lnk
3.Run the Uninstall file.
4.Reboot your computer.
There are other options to find the uninstall file:-paste the following string to Windows Explorer address bar and execute it (Press Enter key):
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Uninstall\PAV\Uninstall.lnk
or
Start->Run->C:\Program Files\Common Files\Uninstall\PAV\Uninstall.lnk
After that our product will be removed.
If you have any questions concerning our software, please contact our Customer Support Service.

Anna Hamilton
Customer Support Specialist
(Where is her company’s address for contact?)

btk1w1

I also was attacked by Personal av. I rarely respond to forums, but I felt the need to THANK YOU for your advice. I tried the link in the email I received from the very "helpful person" that did not work!!! (see below).
I downloaded the link you posted: http://download.bleepingcomputer.c [...] -setup.exe Ran it and deleted as stated, rebooted my computer and YEA-pav is gone. So simple, almost scary!!
I don't claim to be a computer expert, but I been using one long enough to realize if something can't be removed with a few clicks, there has got to have a caught behind it. I have also used several different types of spyware programs, and never have any of them been as irritating as this was. Spent more time clicking the pop-ups then I did surfing!!!
Again, thank you for the info.


dateTue, Jul 14, 2009 at 5:51 AM
subject[#256158] Re: Personal Antivirus product inquiry
mailed-byglobalmailsupport.com

Thank you for contacting Customer Support Center.
Please follow my instructions to uninstall Personal Antivirus:
Paste the following string to Windows Explorer address bar and execute it (Press Enter key):
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Uninstall\PersonalAV\Uninstall.lnk
or
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Uninstall\PAV\Uninstall.lnk
After that our product will be removed.
If you have any questions concerning our software, please contact our Customer Support Service.

-----------------
Kate Connor
Antivirus Customer Support Specialist

Note that there is no info on how to contact Customer support service. The only way to contact them by phone, which was not mentioned in the email-is to purchase their product.

see my post on av2009 if you continue to have problems.

Your reply works great!! Thanks!!

Help!!!!! I'm trying to get rid of Personal Avtivirus, but cannot find it in my prorams/ Any suggestions?

I am trying to access the site posted in order to remove the personal antivirus but it is always coming up as address error or can't find the page... Its like it didn't exist.. do you know why its saying that ?

If you click on the link in chakis last post it won't work because it has been truncated.

Here is the full link:

http://download.bleepingcomputer.c [...] -setup.exe

That you may be lucky is all that means. If your system hadnt set any restore points by the time it was out of your system, then it may well be gone, but if your system did, as they do automatically, then its still there, and resides in sys restore

My son has the same problem! I just tried to fix it with the posted instructions, the problem is, he turned off the computer (after I told him not to). I tried to reboot in safe mode and all I get is a black screen after it looks like it is opening Windows. Any other advice from here? Thanks in advance.

I'm assuming you are using the F8 key during startup to try to boot into safe mode.

If you are, when you are presented with the options that has safe mode, try using the option " Last Known Good Configuration" instead.

It appears the improper shutdown may have corrupted the startup process.

Its fine. Id just wait a minute or two, three at most, depending on whats inside . It comes up slower than normal, and I wanted to make sure. Yes, last known is the best shot from here

Yeah,So that
stupid PersonalAV
popped up and was
like you have a lot
of viruses and it
wouldnt stop popping
up.Then it wouldnt let
me uninstall it.So I
googled how to...and
this popped up and its
running as i type.Yay.
Thank you!!
I can't like tell
you how happy I am that
its gone!
Oh,and whoever invinted
the stupid PersonalAV,
You need to go die!!jk
You just need to get punched
in the face and your
mom needs to reteach you how
to be kind to others!!
But yeah,Im glad that now I
can uninstall it!

Me too! any help would be great! I open up the program to start the scan and in like 3 sec it's gone and scanning stopped??

I am in the process of trying to remove it from another computer in the office, but remember to keep running the kill process, as this personal security does weasel its way back into the system after just once or twice in hitting the kill process. My first run through of the bleeping computer solution has been a failure, as the personal security virus is still there.

Keep a tab on the task manager as well (Ctrl+Alt+Del) as the you sort by name and it will pop back in there, which is how I was able to keep malbytes to keep running, though I believe that is the reason why it did not completely remove.

when i downloaded http://download.bleepingcomputer.c [...] -setup.exe the same thing happened to me when i did the quick scan it would close after about 3 seconds so i tried to do it in safe mode but

when i try to run Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware a message pops up saying "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item."

hey i am having trouble deleting that damn personal security antivirsus software from my laptop because everything time i try to click on the link you provided to delete it my internet explorer freezes and it gives me a message that says my internet explorer has suddenly stop working and it ask you to click on close program. is there anything else i can do?

it seems this little bugger is getting cleverer and cleverer, it now recognises malwarebytes and its download locations.
to get round it do this.

search the net with EXPLORER not internet explorer or firefox.

1 explore your computeer then type in top bar www.malwarebytes.org to get the download

2 when you find the file (free download) on malwarebytes.org when you save it to your computer save it as a DIFFERENT
filename otherwise it wont install

3 once installed goto program files and find malwarebytes folder then find malwarebytes.exe and rename that to say malware.exe make sure you can see the file extension if you cant just change the name but dont add the .exe
then double click on the file to run it then get it to do a scan and it will delete the personal security suite virus.

i would love to know how these hackers who built this can remain anonymous and get paid and theres no trail to them

Alan _F

yeh that does look easier than what i said

NOT

I have the same type of mal-ware, called "Personal Security" virus. Right after clicking it from Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel, it begins to spread and dominates whole system. It won't let me to start anything including import from USB mem. While I am googling it, there are many possible ways to remove it, but most of them are a bit long procedure. So, I decided to do <System Restore> from <Safe Mode> logging in as <Administrator>. Fortunately, it was working in this case. After system restore, I ran 2 system care applications such as <Advanced System Care> <CCleaner> and <Belarc Advisor> <HijackThis> for checking the status of system and to find out if such mal-ware still running. They found none. So this is another alternative to cure this disease.

I have tried every single suggestion posted on this page and not a single one has worked in removing this stupid program. I can't even get the downloaded removing programs to open up, it gives me my popup asking if I want to open it and I click yes and it does nothing.
It's driving me insane.
Are there any more suggestions that might work before I kill the makers of this program?

i waz wonderin duz this method cost money because i am only 13 and i already hve avast which hasnt picked up anything. but the personal security is really anoying me but if it costs 4 this do u no any other method of removing
it

dnasmith's method worked perfectly for me!!! March 4th, 2010. None of the other methods work. This is great, a ton of computers at my university have this awful program on it and I finally found an easy fix !!!! THANK YOUU

Hi James_38,
i am praveen from india.

Really really thank full to you, Because i stuck with personal security anti mal-ware from 2 days, it will stop all the processes in laptop.No one application also not opened and installed .
i search for " How to uninstall Personal security ". But it shows a lot of process.
No i got that path
( C:\Program Files\Common Files\Uninstall\PAV\Uninstall.lnk )
by visiting your review on your problem.

Once again Thank you very much. I appreciate you.Thank you very much.
If you want to reply me My mail id is " cherrysmooth@ymail.com "