Smarterware

I had a similar experience a few weeks ago while trying to remove some malware called Personal Security [see this Bleepingcomputer article] from a friend’s PC. I ended up booting the machine from the UBCD4WIN live CD and deleting the program files that made up the malware.

Once that was done, I was able to restart the machine normally and install and run Malwarebytes to complete the cleanup. I’m sure that if I’d had more time, I would have been able to figure out how to edit the Windows registry from a Linux live CD — but, any port in a storm.