SOLVED: A Program with Chinese Characters APP IS PREVENTING YOU FROM SIGNING OUT

If you shut down, restart or sign out of your PC and see the following ‘Chinese’ characters:

牔獵整牥潎楴楦慣楴湯牁慥獍䉧硯
This app is preventing you from signing out.

You have IBM/Trusteer Apex or Rapport installed.  Trusteer Apex is security software that effectively replaces antivirus.  Trusteer Rapport is a module from Apex that Trusteer has distributed through many banks to protect the browser from being hacked.

I had ruled out Chinese symbols but thought it might be Taiwanese… I was wrong.  I banged my head on this for a few hours and then posted with Microsoft Partner Support and Sally Xie nailed it:

Based on my knowledge base, “牔獵整牥潎楴楦慣楴湯牁慥獍䉧硯” should be displayed in Unicode.  After converting it into ASCII code:

牔 0x54 0x72 Tr
獵 0x75 0x73 us
整 0x74 0x65 te
牥 0x65 0x72 er
潎 0x4E 0x6F No
楴 0x74 0x69 ti
楦 0x66 0x69 fi
慣 0x63 0x61 ca
楴 0x74 0x69 ti
湯 0x6F 0x6E on
牁 0x41 0x72 Ar
慥 0x65 0x61 ea
獍 0x4D 0x73 Ms
䉧 0x67 0x42 gB
硯 0x6F 0x78 ox

So, 牔獵整牥潎楴楦慣楴湯牁慥獍䉧硯 got the result:

TrusteerNotificationAreaMsgBox

Great work Sally!  Below are the answers to some followup question I had for Sally: AKA, the smartest person on earth!

1. How did you get the screen shot converted to symbols so you could translate it?
In fact, they are all Chinese characters, but some are Traditional Chinese, some are Simplified Chinese.
And 2 of them (牁&䉧) are only used in Cantonese now.

Luckily, I know Cantonese a bit. That is why I am able to type them out with the help of dictionary.

2. Did you ‘just know’ this was Unicode or did you have some previous experience with this problem?
I’ve ever met similar problem on my own computer. Especially when I tried to extract some Japanese naming achieve files, I would always see this kind of notification. But of course, they are not the same characters.

3. Can you share your table that shows these characters as I can find none
I didn’t use a table to do this, I got some tools for additional help.

You may refer to this link to see how it converts:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kdcak6ye(v=vs.110).aspx

However, I have another easier way which is more friendly:
1) Paste what you want to convert into a Microsoft Word Document.
2) Select which letter you want to convert (Please note, you should choose them to convert one by one, it is not supported to convert the long string), press ALT+X, then you will see its codes.
Take 牁 as example, you will get the code 7241, so it is consisted of ASCII 0x41 and 0x72, we got the result “a” and “r”.

If you want to see the full thread and you are a Microsoft Partner, you can read it: http://partnersupport.microsoft.com/en-us/mpnwinclient/forum/mpnwin-mpnwindows10pro/chinese-like-characters-on-shutdown/e5f55bd1-cab1-4f91-8f81-d3a1baf6fcf4 .

I have reported this through to IBM/Trusteer and I hope they correct this virus like text.