A Computer Love Story
My ability to either do amazing things on a computer or royally screw things up is measured by the Google-ability of the problem. In most cases anyway. I have learned a lot, researching, reading, and asking an insane amount of questions. I'll probably write about some of that stuff here, until I forget this bloglet exists, and cause it to go dead... which I hope won't happen - but history is a great indicator of future behavior, so I'll try to be entertaining or at least coherent while I'm here.
My ability to either do amazing things on a computer or royally screw things up is measured by the Google-ability of the problem. In most cases anyway. I have learned a lot, researching, reading, and asking an insane amount of questions. I'll probably write about some of that stuff here, until I forget this bloglet exists, and cause it to go dead... which I hope won't happen - but history is a great indicator of future behavior, so I'll try to be entertaining or at least coherent while I'm here.
My Antivirus 2009 Infection
Posted 01-22-2009 at 11:20 AM by kiriaka
My internets were itchy, about two days ago. I got this Antivirus 2009 thing and freaked, calmed down, and proceeded to accuse everyone in my family of infecting my computer by using Internet Explorer...
"Alright, who was using IE to get on the internet?" I yelled through the house. "Someone gave me an infection, now it's going to take forever to get rid of it. I told you guys, only use Firefox."
I settled in to see just what the damage was. At every search in Firefox, my page was being redirected to places like shopica.com, and miva (whatever that is). Lots of popups and finally, after trying to disable and fix things myself, the internet stopped working altogether. I quickly opened up techsupport.com and found this thread: http://www.techsupportforum.com/secu...-disabled.html
Which I promptly saved as text. I also read through and downloaded all of the tools listed in the thread to a usb drive from my Vista machine (which was not infected). Once I had all the tools listed, I shut down the internet, and plugged the USB drive into the infected machine. Working fast, I followed all directions to the letter - without the ability of feedback about my logs I had to assume my results were similar to the thread-starters. The next day I finished up the cleanup, ran Kapersky and deleted all used tools (i.e. combo-fix /u) in the manner specified.
Now, 48 hours later, my computer is running fine, and I'm adopting some of the recommendations listed last in the thread. It's invaluable to have the archived support threads from techsupport, and helps that admins do not allow people to try to gain help through private messaging. Most of these problems swim from machine to machine like a wave, and having the ability to read post for post what to do has helped me tremendously (more than once).
So thanks to the analyst who facilitated that thread, you helped me too!
"Alright, who was using IE to get on the internet?" I yelled through the house. "Someone gave me an infection, now it's going to take forever to get rid of it. I told you guys, only use Firefox."
I settled in to see just what the damage was. At every search in Firefox, my page was being redirected to places like shopica.com, and miva (whatever that is). Lots of popups and finally, after trying to disable and fix things myself, the internet stopped working altogether. I quickly opened up techsupport.com and found this thread: http://www.techsupportforum.com/secu...-disabled.html
Which I promptly saved as text. I also read through and downloaded all of the tools listed in the thread to a usb drive from my Vista machine (which was not infected). Once I had all the tools listed, I shut down the internet, and plugged the USB drive into the infected machine. Working fast, I followed all directions to the letter - without the ability of feedback about my logs I had to assume my results were similar to the thread-starters. The next day I finished up the cleanup, ran Kapersky and deleted all used tools (i.e. combo-fix /u) in the manner specified.
Now, 48 hours later, my computer is running fine, and I'm adopting some of the recommendations listed last in the thread. It's invaluable to have the archived support threads from techsupport, and helps that admins do not allow people to try to gain help through private messaging. Most of these problems swim from machine to machine like a wave, and having the ability to read post for post what to do has helped me tremendously (more than once).
So thanks to the analyst who facilitated that thread, you helped me too!
Total Comments 3
Comments
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can you help with A360Posted 01-30-2009 at 02:53 PM by camatoc
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I always use Avast AV home edition with Malwarebytes Antimalware
never had a problem with viruses :)Posted 02-01-2009 at 12:41 PM by RockmasteR
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try security task managerPosted 02-20-2009 at 04:48 AM by gops
