My husband found a bunch of bad stuff on our computer last night. I had been noticing strange things, lockups in YahooMail, porn popups on sites where they shouldn’t have been, and a gray box that kept coming up saying it was going to create my account in 30 seconds (which I’d shut down from my Task Manager within the 30 seconds and it said it was a XXX program).
I had been shutting down ZoneAlarm to access the blog program I use to update CompareRewards, and apparently that’s how these programs got in. The keylogger is especially bad because it records every keystroke and reports them back to…SOMEONE. I can’t tell ya how many programs I’ve logged into just in the last three days, entering my login info, and I even made a couple of credit card purchases.
I’m mentioning this because it’s possible I got all these cooties from a site we may have in common — maybe a paid mail I read, maybe a search engine result…who knows. But it’s probably a good idea to do a virus scan on your machine. I can give you some file names to look for, but you can’t delete just these files, use a virus scanner! Two file names were cmd32.exe and svcinit.exe. Also, a legit program called WinGuardian was modified (to do something malicious) and installed from whoever had remote access to my machine. And I had something called the Tanked worm, that is installed into a Kazaa directory, if you use that service — I don’t use that service but my hubby had installed it a long time ago and forgotten about it.
Please note that I will NEVER send you an attachment in email; if you get one attached to a mail from me, DO NOT OPEN IT and PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I don’t think this is how I got infected but it’s just a good rule of thumb.
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Spybot Search & Destroy: http://download.com.com/3000-2144-10194058.html?tag=lst-0-1
AdAware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I use Ad-Aware and it’s GREAT. It tells you every single little data miner that tries to steal your info (even cookies from Microsoft!). Sometimes they’re safe little buggers, but it tells you the URL the cookie was downloaded from and you can decide whether you want it or not. It makes it very easy to block cookies from particular sites, and keep your computer safe and happy
well lol you think it gets rid of every little bugger coz it doesnt show any more so even if there were mallicious filews left then you wouldnt know about it
I have a virus that starts up with my browser called C:\Secure.html
Can anyone help me kill this mother.