Possible fake Norton scam?

A friend has been complaining that Norton has stealthily installed itself more than once and then wanted money to fix problems found.

I'm no great fan of Norton personally but can't see this being genuine - I've told him it sounds a lot like the Microsoft Security warning scam that was doing the rounds not so long ago. Do you think that is the right answer?

Thanks in advance.

My guess is that it's not legit.

There have been malicious "Norton" security products around since about 2006 iirc.

There are quite a few around at the moment, I used unhackme in safe mode to get rid of one tonight after visiting a site I visit everyday that has been hacked today & a little present left for us in the php code.

My daughter had something like it on her laptop the other day.
It opened a window insisting there was malware on the computer and it needs to correct it.
The window couldn't be closed and all other programs were inaccessible, including task manager.
Luckily her account on W7 has no admin rights, so I was able to log on as admin and restore
W7 to previous update.
Unfortunately she has lost some documents, which I am still trying to restore,any help would be appreciated.
Regards
M

Not too familiar with W7, but you might look at safemode and system restore (or the W7 version).

It's always wise to have something like UBCD4Win or a Barts PE edition at hand for emergencies. These are bootable media which contain amongst other things, a freestanding WinPE environment. From here, you can run programs such as SuperAntiSpyware, MBAM and other anti malware apps which are fully independent of the target OS. As network support is available, all definitions etc are fully updateable.

Next time go the malware bytes route. You shouldn't lose data.

In reply to a post by martinsq:

..... Unfortunately she has lost some documents, which I am still trying to restore,any help would be appreciated....

Exactly how were the documents lost? Were the files infected? What filetypes were they?
If they were directly deleted for whatever reason then the simple act of starting Windows can make their recovery unlikely. If this happens again, do not boot the machine from it's hard drive but from media which contains recovery software and doesn't write to the hard drive. (UBCD, Barts PE etc etc).