New compter virus alert

[FISHINMAN]

I had a virus attack on our PC Saturday. It tells you you have a virus and a little red "balloon" with a white "X" pops up in the icon tray at the bottom of the page. At least that's what ours did and that was after my son had run an update with AVG and I have zone alarm and malware bytes on my PC also. It tells you that you have a virus and need to download this "personal anti virus software" and a rectangle window pops up. If you press the X, NO, DON'T WANT, or anything else on the screen to get rid of it, it automatically loads it onto the computer and takes away whatever it is that lets you log on. You try to log in and it says it's loading your personal settings and even gives you your background screen but no icons appear then it logs you off and put's you back onto your log in screen again.

My brother who is a computer guy that does work for the Navy building the computers for things such as the new flight simulators and has never failed to get my PC back up and going is at a loss with this one. We tried to get on by going through safe mode using all sorts of stuff outa his bag of tricks but even got stopped there. He says we would need to know the name of whatever got in or re-load windows XP and start a recovery through that.

He did some reading up on it and said the only thing to do when this screen occurs is to pres ctrl-alt-delete to get out of it

Hope this helps someone else to not get into the situation we are in. i'll let ya know if we get it figured out or if anybody else has had this problem, help would be appreciated

[Broadhorizons]

I had it 2 weeks ago also. Had to wipe the computer out and start over, what a pain. Some people need to get a life other than making computer viruses. I am now a former user of AVG and Microsoft Internet Explorer, people make too many viruses set up for IE.

[FISHINMAN]

I had it 2 weeks ago also. Had to wipe the computer out and start over, what a pain. Some people need to get a life other than making computer viruses. I am now a former user of AVG and Microsoft Internet Explorer, people make too many viruses set up for IE.

I agree! Losers, but I guess that's the type of society we live in now .

From talking to my brother running the malware is the best thing to do if you see something like this, should get rid of it. I am hoping to just use the XP Cd and do a repair. gonna try it tomorrow.

[John]

I had the same thing happen on my computer...still need to fix it..please let me know if you figure it out..tks John

[Gator]

This program is a Trojan and from what I've found, most anti-virus programs won't touch it. There's a whole variety of these things floating around that claim, "your computer is infected and you need our antivirus program", when they're actually the virus. The good news is that it won't corrupt your data, just be annoying, reset your IE homepage, continuous pop-ups, mine even kept me from accessing the Task Manager (ie Ctrl Alt Delete) to try to stop it from running.

You can start your computer in safe mode and try to physically delete the files that it's added to your registry (which is what causes the program to activate as soon as you boot up). If you delete the wrong files, though, you're FUBAR. Or you can hit Ctrl Alt Delete before the program starts up, but that's tricky timing. You've got to do it before it keeps you from accessing the Task Manager, but then you can halt the process (you'll probably see it come on...it eats up lots of memory).

What I did was bite the bullet and bought a anti-malware program that can deal with these types of infections. I used Spyware Doctor and it did the trick. There may be other programs out there that work, but Spyware Doctor has a great reputation and has won various award, plus they're reputable and even have a customer service center. But it cost me ~30 bucks. I actually disabled the program after running cleanup so that it's not active in the background, but I can run it again if I get infected. That way it won't interfere with the AV software I usually use.

Whatever you do, don't purchase the software that the popups are trying to sell you. As you've figured out, it's a scam. Good luck!

[ray koziatek]

Ditto to dont hit the popup hardware, that was how my wifes credit card got hacked 1 month later we got a 1000.00 western union charge from overseas and the western union number on that site is also a scam...we got our money back but the card is long gone and i still wont use my computer to order stuff as the ghost screen still pops up..

[walleyemagic]

Try running avast from safe mode

[FISHINMAN]

Keith and walleyemagic, thanks for the info. Problem with deleting the files is we don't know the names of them and the malware programs will take care of it from what I have read and my brother told me, but problem is I can't get on to run anything . Trust me my brother had me doing everything we could through safe mode. My nephew told me about Avest just yesterday and I have actually loaded it onto my lap top today.

Got my "secret" copy of XP today so I'll try it later tonight. Worst part is I was gonna do a back up that day and it was already to late

[sfarm]

I wish someone could catch these freaks and charge them with distruction of property or something for makeing us buy all this crap to protect our computers . Norton even misses some of these trojans

[xdbcx]

I recently had a similar virus. To save you some time I will tell you I ended up formatting my hard drive and reinstalling windows xp. I will tell you as far as I got and if you feel like putting in more time than I did you may be able to figure out the rest of the steps in cleaning your p.c. rather than wipe it all out. Pop-ups for Windows System Defender kept popping up. The task manager was disabled, auto updates for my virus software were disabled and many other programs were infected. I was able to clean out the majority of the virus but still had some strange things happen when using IE. Since my task manager was disabled I downloaded a program that was an alternative to the windows task manager. Sorry I forget the name of it. It acted just like the task manager and told me all my running processes. I did some research on this fake antivirus program. Searched "windows system defender removal guide" In this guide it told me the name of all the files I had to kill in order to get rid of this virus. After using the alternative task manager program I was able to disable the running process called wsd. After disabling the process the popup windows stopped appearing. I was now able to locate where the virus stemmed from on my hard drive. I then disabled the .dll files stored in that folder. I was then able to update my virus software and access my task manager, but still had some strange issues. Every time I would run a scan on my p.c. it would keep finding a new virus. After the first scan the virus would be 1a. After cleaning that virus and running a new scan it would then find a virus called 1b and so on. Ever time I searched something on Yahoo or Google it would then direct me to some strange site that had nothing to do with my original search. This is where I gave up and just formatted my drive with a fresh install. I should have just done this right from the get go. On the other hand I did have a friend who recently had something very similar happen to their p.c. and symantec was able to clean the p.c. out. Just because the symtoms were the same the actual infection could be totally different. It took me five days of trial and error to get as far as I did. Hope this helps.

[janz]

Avast is the best I've used to this date. Updates itself 5-6 times a day. Since installing it I have not had a single problem. Going on 7 months now.

[FISHINMAN]

Ended up doing a system recovery which it wouldn't let me do the other day but we managed to get through it tonight .

Will need to go in and do all the re installs for some stuff that we had on it and get rid of stuff that is back on it. computer seems to have all the stuff that was on it when we first bought it a few years ago

So far so good I am gonna go download malware bytes and avest.

[mschott]

I had the same type of bug get in mine,tried everything i could think of got rid of most of it ,but seemed liked the "host"was hidden cause when i'd reboot and click on anything it would repopulate and i'd be back at ground zero this virus got through norton totally undetected . What worked for me was a 20$ subscription to Stopzilla its an anti ad & malware program found something like 700 infected files .What it didnt get rid of avast took care of the rest.- my hair is starting to grow back now .

[muskybob]

A very nice little program to run after you're done with deleting files is Glary Utilities which has a few programs to clean things up in the registry, history, etc. Best thing is it's free http://www.majorgeeks.com/Glary_Utiliti ... d6236.html Remember to update once a week to keep things running smooth.

[FISHINMAN]

Ran Malware Bytes and that got 7 infections 4 which were Trojan horses and 1 worm ( bad bait ).

Things seem good so far , now I just have to go get back and find our "old users" and try to log into them and move the files from before to get back all our stuff like pics (told the freaking Mrs a 1,000 times to load them on to photo bucket ) and other files.

[muskybob]

Tom, Malwarebytes is a good program, but you still have to clean the registry.

[johnbrownt]

musky thanks for that for program link, did not have any big problams but did speed up my puter.

[traveling man]

my step daughter down loaded it on our computer. took the computer in and they were able to get rid of it. They told me that if anything "pops up" on your screen that you should press ALT and F4 to get out of that screen.

[muskybob]

musky thanks for that for program link, did not have any big problams but did speed up my puter.

Thanks John, glad to hear it helped. That major geeks site has helped me a lot thru the years. Excellent forums for computer help.