Colin Leake Posted November 24, 2010 Author Share Posted November 24, 2010 Dave Newell - 2010-11-24 6:50 AM Out of pure coincidence I suffered a scareware attack last night, I searched for a photo of a Winnebago and the first hit got me a flashing message in the middle of my screen saying my computer was infected and it needed to be scanned. I closed Firefox by using ctrl/alt/delete to bring up the task manager and ended firefox from there so I didn't click on anything in the web browser. Launched IE and downloaded Malwarebytes, ran it overnight and it found 37 infections, removed them and rebooted and all seems well so far. D. I'm glad your computer is now working OK but I would still recommend down loading Spybot and following the procedure in my original posting. Malwarebytes is good but when you run spybot you will be amazed how much more it finds. Also according to my son, who believe me would know, if you run the immunize option and keep it up to date it will give you the best (but not full-proof) protection available. He also recommends using Internet Explorer 8, rather than Firefox, as it has the best Malware protection built in Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colin Leake Posted November 24, 2010 Author Share Posted November 24, 2010 Colin Leake - 2010-11-23 3:42 PM pelmetman - 2010-11-22 9:33 PM peter - 2010-11-22 9:04 PM It's one where, if your wife caught you looking at it , she would probably throw a wobbly. If you get my drift. :-> You mean like outandaboutlive (lol) (lol) One hopes not but technically it's not impossible even if they are taking precautions! One hopes not but technically it's not impossible even if they are taking precautions! However having said that it certainly is not presently infected or we would all be in trouble, and I'm sure if it did get infected whoever runs it for them would deal with it as quickly as possible. Because of frequency of use of sites like this even if they failed to notice there would be telephone calls flying to let them know. It is the smaller sites that are not so often used and run by owners low on expertise. Say one selling wicker baskets . Some may be innocently infected or others may be bogus sites set up as Trojan Horses to carry and deliver the malicious software. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Newell Posted November 24, 2010 Share Posted November 24, 2010 Thanks Colin, I will download Spybot forthwith and run it without delay ;-) . D. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest JudgeMental Posted November 24, 2010 Share Posted November 24, 2010 Thanks from me also, have gone back to spybot and added malewhere thingy as well :-D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enodreven Posted November 24, 2010 Share Posted November 24, 2010 Hi, Dave you were very lucky the Ctrl-Alt-Del worked, if you had clicked on the banner saying you were infected then it may have disabled the Ctrl-Alt-Del function, and you would have had to try what I posted above , e.g. using Ctrl-Alt-Del as the computer was booting and then hopefully you could have stopped the problem that way, which would then allow you to do exactly what you did in downloading a program to sort it out. Just remember the Ctrl-Alt-Del and Task manager route as even S&D is not infallible Also "Teatimer" can slow the computer down Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pelmetman Posted November 24, 2010 Share Posted November 24, 2010 I have Norton 360, will the spybot work with it ok (?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colin Leake Posted November 25, 2010 Author Share Posted November 25, 2010 Yes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colin Leake Posted November 28, 2010 Author Share Posted November 28, 2010 After our last attack we received an email from a regular and well respected source that comes in as a monthly news letter. This normally starts of welcome to followed by our email address. On the latest one the email address had been replaced by the access password into our computer. The senders have no idea how this happened and I'm confident they were genuinely surprised it had. As it happens it did not matter as one of the first things I did after the attack was to change that password, but it does show just what these malicious software attacks are capable of because I assume the password had been past on elsewhere. So following my advice on how to get rid of such attacks I should have added make sure you change as a minimum the access password into your computer and possibly any others that you deem to be sensitive such as those connected with bank and credit card accounts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bulletguy Posted November 28, 2010 Share Posted November 28, 2010 Colin Leake - 2010-11-23 3:31 PM Re formatting or rebuilding your computer will work just fine if you have a spare hard drive and all your original driver and soft ware discs and passcodes etc to hand. You clearly know what you are doing and you are quite right in what you do. However getting hit by such a problem may not be a big deal to you but to most computer users with a single hard drive and no specialist computer skills it is a very big deal indeed and these are the users I am trying to help get out of a hole that they would otherwise find it impossible to escape from. Unfortunately this sort of malicious software is becoming an ever increasing problem! Colin Running any pc with no OS software (preferably OEM and not copies) is simply begging for trouble. Hard drive prices are now so cheap (brand new 1tb can be picked up off eBay for as little as £35), to me it makes sense to run with two drives. Small one for C drive, larger for the second or D drive. Advantages are obvious. Any infection will come through the C drive....the smallest drive which is quick and easy to run through AV, defrag, or reformat. That's the advantage of running two drives. The cost is minimal. Anyone without should go out tomorrow and buy one! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bulletguy Posted November 28, 2010 Share Posted November 28, 2010 braunston - 2010-11-23 5:10 PM Hi, I had Avast, S&D which I update every other day and allow teatimer to run and Malwarebytes running and still got hit just by going to a site that was on a Google seach list that i ran (Not Porno I hassen to add LoL) The way I cured it was restarting the computer and pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del as it was rebooting and entered into the Task manager and ended/stopped the rouge process/application from starting/running then loaded windows as normal and deleted the offending small program. Gets rid of the file but that doesn't necessarily mean you've got rid of the problem permanently! I used exactly the same procedure when I had rlvknlg.exe A couple of days later it was back again. A reformat sorted it.........permanently! Another evil one is the csrss.exe which you have to be careful with as one is a worm virus, but an identically named file is also a legit MS client server runtime file. Can't remember now which one it is but one of them basically starts ramming up your CPU by which time you won't be going very far in accessing the internet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mel B Posted November 28, 2010 Share Posted November 28, 2010 Bulletguy - 2010-11-28 3:08 PM Colin Leake - 2010-11-23 3:31 PM Re formatting or rebuilding your computer will work just fine if you have a spare hard drive and all your original driver and soft ware discs and passcodes etc to hand. You clearly know what you are doing and you are quite right in what you do. However getting hit by such a problem may not be a big deal to you but to most computer users with a single hard drive and no specialist computer skills it is a very big deal indeed and these are the users I am trying to help get out of a hole that they would otherwise find it impossible to escape from. Unfortunately this sort of malicious software is becoming an ever increasing problem! Colin Running any pc with no OS software (preferably OEM and not copies) is simply begging for trouble. Hard drive prices are now so cheap (brand new 1tb can be picked up off eBay for as little as £35), to me it makes sense to run with two drives. Small one for C drive, larger for the second or D drive. Advantages are obvious. Any infection will come through the C drive....the smallest drive which is quick and easy to run through AV, defrag, or reformat. That's the advantage of running two drives. The cost is minimal. Anyone without should go out tomorrow and buy one! What about just splitting your existing hard drive into two? We have done that, all the programmes are on the C:\ (smaller) part and the files etc on the other, that way if we have a problem we can just reformat and reinstall the programmes onto C:\ . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bulletguy Posted November 28, 2010 Share Posted November 28, 2010 Mel B - 2010-11-28 7:43 PM What about just splitting your existing hard drive into two? We have done that, all the programmes are on the C:\ (smaller) part and the files etc on the other, that way if we have a problem we can just reformat and reinstall the programmes onto C:\ . Split drive is ok. I've done that myself before though I wasn't using as much gb as what I need now. Only downside to split is if the drive goes bang you stand to lose the entire lot of whatever is on....unless you keep back up of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colin Leake Posted November 29, 2010 Author Share Posted November 29, 2010 Bulletguy - 2010-11-28 3:08 PM Colin Leake - 2010-11-23 3:31 PM Re formatting or rebuilding your computer will work just fine if you have a spare hard drive and all your original driver and soft ware discs and passcodes etc to hand. You clearly know what you are doing and you are quite right in what you do. However getting hit by such a problem may not be a big deal to you but to most computer users with a single hard drive and no specialist computer skills it is a very big deal indeed and these are the users I am trying to help get out of a hole that they would otherwise find it impossible to escape from. Unfortunately this sort of malicious software is becoming an ever increasing problem! Colin Running any pc with no OS software (preferably OEM and not copies) is simply begging for trouble. Hard drive prices are now so cheap (brand new 1tb can be picked up off eBay for as little as £35), to me it makes sense to run with two drives. Small one for C drive, larger for the second or D drive. Advantages are obvious. Any infection will come through the C drive....the smallest drive which is quick and easy to run through AV, defrag, or reformat. That's the advantage of running two drives. The cost is minimal. Anyone without should go out tomorrow and buy one! Don't bank on it some of these malicious soft-wares will look to see what drives you have and install on all of them. I know of a case where this has happened Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mel B Posted November 29, 2010 Share Posted November 29, 2010 Colin ... in which case even separate drives won't protect you anyway. :-S Bullet - Yes - we have 2 external hard drives which we back-up to so no problem there. :-D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bulletguy Posted November 29, 2010 Share Posted November 29, 2010 Colin Leake - 2010-11-29 5:04 PM Don't bank on it some of these malicious soft-wares will look to see what drives you have and install on all of them. I know of a case where this has happened Good luck to any that can find my 640 drive.........it's external and only ever connected to the pc when I want a folder off it. (lol) I shift everything I want to keep safe and secure to that drive. The rest is on discs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colin Leake Posted December 1, 2010 Author Share Posted December 1, 2010 Don't forget that my original post was aimed at helping the great mass of users who have only one drive, lack the computer skills you obviously have and have little interest in acquiring them. As it happens I do have a second drive which is kept round my daughters house and is used only to back up photos and other documents. This is intended to keep the data readily available in the event of a computer failure or heaven forbid a house fire. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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