I just had the nastiest Virus

[Sinophile]

So today I just had the nastiest Virus on my laptop today. The last thing I installed was Splinter Cell: Conviction, and I visit only safe websites. This piece of malware pretended to be an anti-virus program itself, and constantly prompted me to go to their website and purchase their bogus software. I could not surf the web, or even use system restore. It would not let me run Ccleaner, or open any program whatsoever without prompting me with a bogus message claiming it was infected. So I had to reboot in safe mode, then launch Firefox(since I forgot how to open system restore through a command prompt), I got a message that the browser was configured to use a proxy, and had to reconfigure it to not use the proxy.I eventually managed to use system restore from a command prompt(since the control panel has limited functionality in safe mode). Thus far, everything seems back to normal. My question now is, where could it have come from?

[Thor.]

That's a nasty one, Witch OS are you running.

 

Probably from Splinter Cell, They say Ubisoft is one of the most hated company's :P Thats probably why. Lol just joking about that one.

 

Its a mystery where its origin usually is, but 90% of them come from the web or Malware on your pc.

[LHammonds]

That fake anti-virus program is a really slippery devil. It is smart in the fact that it does not pop up and display itself as soon as it infects the PC...which would be a dead giveaway as to where it came from...but instead, it lurks and waits for trigger events to display itself and try to trick people into sending money to remove bogus infections...and the irony of it is that it makes the situation worse.

 

I am currently fighting off a VERY nasty infection at work. It is a virus that, when active, infects and attaches itself to each and every .EXE, .COM and .HTML file on your hard drive. To make matters worse, it searches for and targets servers once it gets through your outer defenses. We had one server that got infected and we "cleaned" over 2,000 infected program files. Our main anti-virus program can now catch and clean it before spreading but some pieces of it are apparently in "stealth" mode and able to avoid detection from that particular anti-virus program. It's not until I boot machines with a rescue CD and use another virusscanner that it sees the same virus that is still attached to a few key windows files.

 

Luckily, I found the Trojan that drops the virus and it consistently exists in the same path as executable file name every time. I simply modified our domain policy to not allow anyone to execute that specific program...not even domain administrators.

 

Dropping Internet Explorer and using FireFox with certain add-ons has all but killed the vast amount of daily infections (attempted infections) here at my workplace. However, we are not able to outright disable IE because one of our internal applications requires it...and unfortunately, some of our users forget to close it and use Firefox to browse the net. :wallbash:

 

LHammonds

[Thor.]

I had something like that on my Moms older Laptop, its a nasty one indeed. I managed to remove it through the install wizard in the control panel and ended its process in the Windows task manager before i did. Almost lost the os there. She's running a older IBM Laptop with XP home and man its tricky trying to remove something like that, lucky i knew a few tricks on how to.

 

Its sneaky for sure, it asked several times to ask for a scan but ended its process several times :verymad:

 

Step 2 was to go into safe mode and use a "usb Anti virus scanner, up to date" to remove it, since using the one on the os was a bad idea.

 

Uninstalled the os one and reinstalled it after i was done.

 

This happened not to long ago.

 

It corrupted several key files to the anti virus witch was AVG, not very reliable that one is.

[XanAlderon]

Well, as recent as a week ago I downloaded the newest driver for my graphics card; after installing and restarting the computer simply would not turn on. After the normal picture of my motherboard it just went blank... :sad:

 

Luckily however, I was able to get into the bios and reinstall XP. Lesson learnt.