Prevention
I know this article deals with the removal of these threats after the fact, but I just wanted to share something that has worked to prevent these issues from popping up in the first place (regarding scareware). I had my wife take these two steps because I got tired of having to come home after work and fix the computers in my own house. I had her change from using IE to Firefox (insert alternate browser here) and told her to stop using Google for searches and start using Yahoo (insert alternate search engine here). I have nothing against either of these two products, they just happen to be the biggest targets. Since making those two changes I have not had to remove malware from her machine in over a year. I give this piece of advice to all customers who pay me to remove a virus infestation and have had no re-infections.
By the way, I've always found Combofix to be very helpful in cleaning out the rootkits that some scareware infections bring along with them.
