For anyone who might be interested, here's what I ran across last weekend.
My neighbor contacted me saying that she had the continuous popup messages about her computer being infected, and that she would need to pay them to disinfect it.
I ran Malwarebytes (in Safe Mode) which stopped all the popups (it found and removed 15 evil items).
Most things worked after that, except searching in Google. I could run a Google search on anything, and I would see the normal Google hits. However, clicking on any of the links took me to an advertisement page of some sort (no porn, luckily).
Typing the website directly into the browser took me to the proper page. It was just by clicking the link in the Google search page that took me to the ads!
I noticed she wasn't running an antivirus software, so asked why? She responded that she gets all her email from AOL, and they handle that.
I downloaded and ran the free Avast! and it found a number of items that it could not remove while Windows was running, and asked if it could remove them upon reboot.
I clicked OK and it rebooted the computer. We watched it run in a DOS-type screen and it found a number of bad stuff, asking each time if it could remove them.
I finally got tired of press Enter, so told it to just go ahead and remove anything that it found (knowing that I might regret this later)
After a bit, Avast finished cleaning and rebooted the computer. That was two days ago, and she only reported her first problem with it today (something about not being able to Save in Microsoft Word Starter edition).
I may have to do a complete reinstall after all.
That will wait til next weekend.
As an additional note, the popup messages were VERY well done! ... not like the old days with misspellings and poor grammar.
These messages came with the title bar "System Restore" and would have easily fooled me if I hadn't been expecting what to see.
They were very subtle.... not a bit cheesy or overdone ... just appeared to be real Windows generated messages.
They even included the little gold and blue "shield" on the Ok button, like the one that Windows displays when it is going to ask you for an Administrator password.
Very slick!
rogerX
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/simplycomputers2
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.