Yorkshire Police scam (startup 'virus')

[Paul Haynes]

I've been hit by this twice in the last month, despite running Avast with automatic updates.

A full-screen message appears claiming to be from the Yorkshire (possibly West Yorkshire?) Police and telling me that my PC is locked and that I need to pay £100 to get it unlocked.  You can't clear this message or get round it, and it reappears on re-boot.  Luckily this turns out to be driven by a line inserted in Startup, so it's fairly easy to remove (F8 on re-boot, edit Startup with startup.exe, run Malwarebytes to remove files).

I have two questions:

1) How come Avast doesn't pick this virus up and stop it from running?  This is one hell of a loophole in the Avast shield.

2) How can I stop unauthorised programs from changing my Startup?  I imagined this would be easy, but after hours of Googling, I have found nothing.

Cheers.

[true indian]

How come Avast doesn't pick this virus up and stop it from running?  This is one hell of a loophole in the Avast shield.

We have repeated this over 100000 times 

No Security program,no antivirus can protect or detect a 100%..So dont just depend fully of the respective AV you are using..Have some self caution while being online and no this is no loop hole 

The reason the above is true because everyday more than 7500000 pieces of malware and viruses come out so no AV keeps up with everything

Why not run a application in addition to avast like malwarebytes pro

Your protection means: 99% security programs,1% self caution....without that 1% self caution that 99% is useless

Avast! has over 165+ million users..enough to say.

this is the problem with most of you PC users,You guys go to bla bla bla sites download bla bla bla and run it without even knowing if its legit or not.Ransomwares come via watching porn or opening unknown attachments.

Ransomwares are re-packed weekly/everyday so it bypasses a lot of AV's and not just avast! and they are in bundles and not just one or two.You just got this one and not the others which I know are tad nasty to remove.

The reason you got infected is not the fault of any AV its the user's fault he didnt look what he is doing.

You can use Win patrol for protecting your PC startup's: http://www.winpatrol.com/download.html