I Have a Virus or an Evil Computer
I did a post last week, or the week before, saying The Hedy Experience, nee’ Hedy Blog had disappeared. I’ve had a few other losses. A few minutes ago I discovered that AJC.com had disappeared from the IE7 Favorites list. I also have a problem with “Google Desktop” stopping suddenly, except that it isn’t installed on the computer.
Now I see that the MagicJack program for my internet phone is no longer resident in the program list and a search of the computer doesn't show it here.
I've been hijacked! Any ideas? Anyone?
I’m running AVG now to be followed by Spybot and whatever else is in this damn thing.
8 comments:
I heard about some evil IE virus you can get just from browsing. You might want to check into it and stop using IE in the mean time. Good luck.
Are you sure it's a virus? A corrupted registry or a failing hard drive could also have those symptoms.
I think the first thing to do, if you haven't already, is backup all of your data- but keep in mind that you might also be backing up a virus or malware, so be careful with it.
You could delete all of your pornography and pirated music and take it to a professional. I think Best Buy/Geek Squad charges around $40.
Or if your computer came with a "restore" disk, you could try that. It will restore your computer to the state it was when you brought it home, so all of your data and any programs you added will be gone, but it would also give you a clean slate to start from.
If you're pretty sure you've got malware or spyware, try AdAware. It's a freebie, but it does excellent work.
The latest version of AVG protects you against that IE virus, or at least, it is supposed to.
I have no idea what is causing the stuff you're describing.
You're using IE7? Why? I think that's your real problem. I don't have these kind of issues with Firefox.
I saw this post, and thought it might be related:
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Confirmed - a major Keenspot advertiser has been compromised with the Mult.ai exploit. This effects ALL browsers that emulate MS IE. I was hit with Opera running.
If you think you may have it, go to your
windows\system32 dir and see if there's a prog called ~.exe
Kill it.
Kill your background processes that have anything to do with Acrobat Reader.
And turn off ALL content in your browser that isn't bare text for now.
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The rest is here.
Thomas, thanks; but, you are about twelve feet over my head.
As to progress, I've run AVG, Spybot and AdAware, they found nothing. I system restored as far back as I could go.
So far, no more bad stuff.
I tried to run sfc/scannow but it will not let me do it unless I'm acting as Administrator and doing some sort of thing that the computer won't let me do.
Again, thanks.
Dave.
What the article referred to was a problem with IE7 that allowed Bad People to take over your computer. About 10,000 web sites were infected with malware, and you're computer could catch it by visiting those sites. One of the sites infected hosted banner ads, so you could be on a "safe" site, and get infected when a third-party advertisement loaded.
If you've caught it, there will be a file named ~.exe in c:\windows\system32 (If it's there, delete it.)
Microsoft patched the hole yesterday, and is pushing out the fix using automatic updates.
I read that bit too about the issues with IE7 -I normally use firefox but also have IE (my daughter prefers that one) but I use IE6 instead as my computer didn't like IE7 right from the get-go. Wish I understood more of the advice you were given here so I could check my computer better too. I do run Ad-Aware and also Spybot, plus I have several other things like AVG and some other stuff that runs in the background, on their own. So far, I think I'm ok but then again, with my limited knowledge of computer things, who knows!!!
Merry Christmas Dave and Happy New Year too!
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