"Scareware" is that creepy software that POPs up a warning window on your computer screen claiming that your computer has been infected by some huge number of awful sounding viruses.
The windows always look sort of "official" -- like they came from Windows or from your antivirus software -- and they say something like "click here to remove".
The problem is that if you click on the window, they will actually install some viruses and/or adware or other malware into your computer! Then they tell you, that they can remove the "found" viruses if you buy the paid version of their virus remover.
Besides the fact that this is blackmail, the fact is that they never really do remove all of the viruses. At minimum, they leave themselves behind to bog down your computer and start damaging or disabling helpful features like "System Restore".
Scareware is expensive to try to repair and, in any "repair" situation seems often to leave the victim machine with some hidden beacon that just calls the bad guys right back to it.
The best, fastest, cheapest and only really through way to fix a computer that is infected with scareware is to reinstall the OS. IF you can get System Restore to work, then it is worth a try, but if you get hit again within a week or two or, as is more and more typical, the System Restore database has been damaged then the correct response is to reinstall Windows.
Reinstalling the operating system, of course, is going to wipe out your data. So, if you don't already have backups saved, and if the computer will still run, make very careful backups of only your necessary documents.
Beware if making an after-the-fact backup: the scareware may try to hide itself among your data. ONLY take your documents, pictures, music and etc. Do not take program files if you can avoid it.
Scareware is a great reason to get into "versioned" backups; either off-site, like Carbonite, or in an external drive. External drives can be infected too, so take care when connecting after the reinstall that the scareware has not inserted itself into the Autorun script on the external drive.
But, if you have a good, clean external backup, then you just "reinstall" the operating system and reload the backup. Cool
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