Zonealarm Crashing and Malware

Customer connected explaining that his laptop could no longer connect to the internet anymore, and that he had installed "CyberDefender" which was causing popups and system crashes.

After connecting with the customer over the telephone yesterday (November 10th), we went into safe mode together and began trying to establish a connection via WebEx. After this connection failed, I walked the customer over the phone through the installation of Lavasoft AdAware, and Trend Micro House Call. After these programs failed to find the malware due to the fact that they could not install updates (ZoneAlarm was stopping everything but Internet Explorer from connecting to the internet), we downloaded and ran Trend Micro HijackThis! and ran a scan. After finding the malware, I walked the customer through disabling the malware from coming up when Windows came up, and reloaded the computer into normal mode. After this, Zonealarm was still having issues and crashing due to being infected, so I walked the user through completing a clean uninstallation of Zonealarm, which reestablished a working internet connection with the customer. I was able at that point to log into his computer via WebEx, and complete the removal of the malware files (via the Windows Install Clean Up tool) and reinstalled the newest version of Zonealarm on his computer. Upon restarting his computer, the customer once again lost his internet connection. We discovered that the problem now was a bug that was found in the newest version of Zonealarm that disabled programs and services from connecting to the internet even though the computer had a connection over wifi. I walked the customer again through an uninstallation of Zonealarm, then reconnected onto his computer and installed an older version of Zonealarm that would not give him these problems. I then set up scheduled scans for the computer to complete daily for him, and advised him to not update his Zonealarm until a newer version than the one that was out now was released.

extreme security, PC Tuneup, zonealarm, lost connerction, malware

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