XP Protection Center is Smoke and Mirrors
It’s really too bad I didn’t know the actual differences between XP Protection Center and the real XP Security Center before it was too late. I’ve always been pretty good about avoiding spyware and viruses, but this particular program really caught me… at least for a while. Luckily, I managed to catch on before I lost my money.
I was going to a new website to watch some videos. I clicked on one, and it said it was downloading a needed video codec. I’m not sure what that was, but it sounded important. Suddenly, this XP Protection Center opened up and told me that I had a ginormous collection of infected files. I didn’t know that my XP Security Center could do this stuff, but it looked real enough to me.
I waited until XP Protection Center finished the scan. It told me that I needed to download an upgrade to get rid of this infection. I thought this was kind of weird, since my computer was set for automatic updates. I decided to go with it.
I got to this website that looked like a sales page. Things really didn’t seem right. It wasn’t a Windows page, that’s for sure. When I saw the price tag they had on XP Protection Center, I suddenly realized that this was all a scam. I didn’t have to buy the Windows Media Player or anything else from them, so why this? It seemed like it was an integral part of the system, so why charge for it?
I had to do the three finger death punch on my keyboard to close my browser. Apparently, XP Protection Center didn’t want me to leave its home page. I reopened my browser to look for reviews of this program, but it restarted. Again, I hit the Ctrl-Alt-Delete buttons, and I shut my computer down.
I used my work computer to find out about XP Protection Center. I found out it was something called a corrupt security tool. It’s a bundle of spyware that pretends to be a part of your Windows system to try and con you out of money. Everywhere I read about it said that I should remove it. This kind of irked me, since I thought I already had the best antispyware tool out there. Well… I had the best free one.
From there, I decided to hunt around for my new antispyware program. It’s amazing to see how many programs can claim to be the “best,” or “top,” or “number one” antispyware program. There were several that had 100% satisfaction guarantees. I only wanted to buy this software once, so I wouldn’t ever have to see XP Protection Center again, so I kept searching.
Eventually, I had the bright idea to look for a 100% removal guarantee. I thought surely this would separate “the men from the boys.” True enough, I found only one program that was making this claim.
SpyZooka was the program making this bold statement. Apparently they are legit, from the five-star ratings and the BBB seal on their page. The idea is that they constantly scan the ‘Net, ready to find and fix new spyware definitions.
I figured it would probably get XP Protection Center well enough, but I didn’t expect how fast it would work. Five minutes, and XP Protection Center was gone!
