|
|
Posted by Mike Minor on 07/13/07 18:50
"Adrienne Boswell" <arbpen@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns996A862F26A5Aarbpenyahoocom@69.28.186.121...
>I have a good friend who asked me to come out and take a look at her
> daughter's computer because it was really slow. Spybot Search and Destroy
> came up with 1,401 malware programs and/or tracking cookies. The anti-
> virus came up with 89 viruses and trojans. I got everything cleaned up,
> installed a Hosts manager, Firefox and Opera (default). Then I told them
> that IE was off limits.
>
> Three days to fix this. Scarey.
>
> --
> Adrienne Boswell at Home
> Arbpen Web Site Design Services
> http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
> Please respond to the group so others can share
>
I'll add my own horror story....keep in mind that I am an IT professional
with nearly 30 years experience. I have firewalls, AV programs, and spyware
programs running all the time.
Our daughter moved back home and began using our home computer. One day I
noticed that there were 32 browser windows open telling me I had a virus and
I should buy one of a variety of new programs to fix the problem. Yea,
RIGHT! I knew immediately that I had gotten some kind of a
virus/malware...( don't WANT to know WHERE that girl was surfing! )
Anyway, I started with my Norton's AV...it found nothing. So I ran AdAware,
Sysclean, Spybot Search and destroy, and did a manual search for various
known virus type files. They found a lot of cookies, and other mild type
threats, but nothing major. Meanwhile, the computer is possessed, opening
browser windows while we sleep, when trying to surf, when not trying to
surf, just whenever it wanted to.
Some of the adware clean up programs mentioned a virus, but none of them
could clean it. They would recommend one program or another. So I bought
Stopzilla and a couple of others that did me no good, other than telling me
there was a bug, but they couldn't fix them. After Googling a lot, I found
out I had SmitFraud. I found a website ( Geeks2go or something like that)
that mentioned a free program, SmitFraudFix. I figured since it was free,
why not. (now let me say, I am in no way affiliated with SmitFraudFix, so I
get nothing out of touting it.)
I downloaded it, ran it, rebooted and ran it again a few times, and low and
behold my problems were fixed. Since that time, we have not had any other
problems. Stopzilla has stopped a couple of subsequent intrusions in there
tracks, and SmitFraudFix keeps a vigilant eye on us.
Norton's scans every night, but in my opinion, it it just window dressing,
not doing a dammned thing to protect us. All in all I spent 3 weeks of
nights and weekends trying to clean up this mess. Just goes to show....
Mikey
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|