Normally I’m a pretty relaxed guy, liberal sensibilities, oppose the death penalty. But there is one crime that must be punished more severely. I’ve had a virus on my computer for what must have been a couple of days now; frantically updating all the usual avenues and scanning to try and get rid. Nothing’s worked.
I deleted the extension that caused the problem, and all was well. For about five minutes, then it reinstalled itself. Now Firefox won’t even open. Reinstalled, nothing, new profile, nothing, ‘salted the earth’ and reinstalled; nothing. Opera works offline, but online crashes straight away. IE is an abomination anyway, and is also infected. Just switched to Chrome, which is also now infected. Any searches redirect to obvious spam sites, rogue ‘anti-virus’ stuff pops up (the bloody cheek!), regedit won’t open.
Just updated AVG manually again, running a full scan to try and pick anything up. Might end up having to take the compy to the shop so they can root the bastard out.
I wish all of these little bastards who code this crap had one big neck, so I could choke them all at once.
Wow. I could have written this rant word for word. Except yesterday I wasn’t threatening burning at the stake or wringing necks. No, my punishment involved a fair number of facial disfigurations. In fact, I would have posted about it, but I can no longer open the SDMB at home.
I’ll have to print out that link from work and take it home.
Why do dudes who know nothing always seem to think you only get Malware from Porn sites? Note that Snopes was a source for Malware for a while. Any site can be, especially if they accept certain kinds of adverts.
Not sure where I got the sodding thing from, I’m quite savvy when it comes to viruses and the like. It’s probable I got it the very stupid way; from an email a friend send, which was no doubt virus-generated. Didn’t open any attachments, but it had them, and that’s when the trouble started.
I was getting really sick of McAfee doing an update every time I got home from work. There’s another issue I’m having with slowness, and McAfee brings it to a screeching halt for 20 minutes every time. I figured that there must be some configuration where I could start the updates manually instead. Just after that, I got a popup that said malware was trying to get through, and I mindlessly accepted the yes button. Now I can’t access any site that’s not G-rated.
What pisses me off is that I tried various cures, and all they did was do scans that took hours, then asked for a credit card number before they’d do a cleanup. Oh, and they installed some toolbar crap.
My preference would be to take them out into the desert and bury them neck deep into a fire ant hill…and then pour honey all over them and leave them out in the sun. I think there will be less smell than if you burn them…plus less pollution.
Other than that I’m all for it. I’ll bring the honey…
Speaking as someone who has spent much of my non-working time over the past three weeks trying to get rid of one of the bloody things on my home machine, I can think of no more fit punishment than forcing these bozos to forever more have to use only computers infected with their own works. Staked to an anthill would be perfectly fine with me, though.
Sounds like the OP’s problem is a rootkit. I’m certainly no expert, but running anti-virus programs alone won’t do much good, as there are likely hooks into the system that are hidden from them, enabling the re-activation of the malware after it supposedly has been cleaned. There are several free tools aimed at eradicating rootkits; I’ve so far had pretty good luck with ComboFix, but the OP may want to subscribe to BleepingComputer or one of the other anti-malware forums for guidance.
I generally use a combination of hardening the PC (turn off autorun and such), ensuring that the computer has the latest security updates (assuming it’s a Windows system), Sophos and Bazooka spyware scanner. I also have a few non-user friendly anti-virus scanners and two registry repair programs if things are REALLY bad.
I’ve heard that HJT threads get posted on forums and whatnot, but there’s a human element there I don’t really trust. ComboFix I’ve also heard of but it’s apparently ‘industrial strength’ so to speak and not for mucking about with. I’ll try the forums you suggested, they’re my last option before I take it in for an expert to rip me off.
Does sound like an embedded problem though, due to the fact that overlay.aux keeps coming back.
I recently got rid of a particularly troublesome infection with a few new programs that I looked up. I used to run AVG, Ad-aware, and spybot which used to clean everything fairly well. Neither of the 3 were picking up my last infection so I went a searching on the virus forums and found a few new ones that cleaned me right up.
First disabled teatimer in spybot to allow registry changes. Then ran HijackThis followed by a scan by Malwarebytes (both free programs). I’ve been running clean since.
Yeah, people get arrested. I’d say the range of penalties runs the gamut…from a slap on the wrist in some cases, through jail time and fairly hefty monetary penalties to a bullet in the back of the head if some of the rumors are true about hackers caught in China.
Sadly no one has (as yet) attempted either burning at the stake or fire ants, deserts and honey…