ZeuS.Zbot.aoaq Zonealarm Marketing Trick

I turned on my computer today to find this Zonealarm pop up on my desktop. Real or fake? Turns out it's fake, and a dirty marketing ploy by Zonealarm. I never thought they'd stoop to this level where they'd try and send SCAREWARE to users of their Zonealarm Free in order to push us into buying their Antivirus products. Common Zonealarm, you guys are better than that!

*Note* although this is a sketchy marketing trick, your computer may actually be infected with other viruses. If you don't have an Antivirus software, please take the opportunity to check out AVG Free, alternatively, for an Antivirus + Firewall solution to purchase, AVG Internet Security 9.0 is what I'd recommend.

Additional info in the comments section.

Chat with their customer support:
http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/support/zonealarm-customer-service.htm

At the end of the chat session, you'll be given a link to send a message to their developers.

Use this message if you'd like:
"Your new Zeus spam message is very disappointing to me as a consumer and a user. I have been a loyal user of your software, and I am surprised that you'd try and scare me into purchasing your software. Could you please let the quality of your software stand for itself and leave the purchasing decision up to the consumer? Please don't send these messages. It degrades the integrity of your company and software."

Best wishes,
-Tri

AVG Antivirus 9.0.790 Internet / DNS problems in Windows XP

*Update* - March 20th, 2010 - From my testing, it looks like the bug occurred during the upgrade from AVG 9.0.730 to 9.0.790. To get 9.0.790 to work, you'll need to uninstall your nonworking AVG, reboot, and download AVG 9.0.790, and install by choosing Custom, and uncheck everything. This should get you AVG back up and running again.


*Update* - March 17th, 2010 - Temporary solution is to uninstall AVG 9.0.790 and install an older version of AVG 9.0.730--this works fine with Zonealarm installed. Windows 7 machines do not seem to be affected by this bug.

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As of March 14th, at two different client sites and on my personal computers, I've run into DNS problems when trying to access the internet after updating AVG Antivirus free edition and business edition version 9.0.790 with Zonealarm installed/uninstalled.

This was a challenge to diagnose because at first, I thought it could be a virus, spyware, or trojan, but the DNS problem showed up in a fresh install of Windows XP. The only site I could visit was google.com and handful of other sites.

Possible solutions I went through: adjust the MTU on the router and network adapter, run AVG, Malwarebytes, Spyware doctor, boot into Safe Mode, repair winsock, Windows Update, but these attempts did not fix the problem. Only after uninstalling AVG, was I able to browse the internet freely again. I am still unsure of the root cause of this, but I will update once there is a solution.

Cheers,
-Tri