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Loss of wifi connectivity after phishing call and remote access

953 views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  Triophile 
#1 ·
Hi, guys.

I'm hoping you might be able to help me with a problem I'm trying to sort out for a friend. He fell prey, unfortunately, to one of those phishing calls, where someone basically says your PC is slow, give us remote access and we'll sort it out.

The end result was loss of wifi connectivity, and he paid them £50 for the privilege.

I've had a look at his machine (an old Dell Dimension 2400 running XP Home SP3), and for starters ran full scans with Avast and MBAM. Avast said it was clean, MBAM picked up some PUPs and a Trojan, but nothing major. A wired connection from his PC to my Netgear 834G modem/router works fine, but wifi doesn't.

When I checked his network settings, I saw Internet Connection Sharing had been turned on (his wifi used to work fine when it was connected straight to his Virgin Media Superhub modem/router, so no need for ICS). His wifi card was also picking up no SSIDs at all. I turned ICS off (in services.msc, set it to manual and rebooted), but there are still two problems:

1) The wifi adapters I've used (his PCI Linksys, and one of my 54g Belkin USB sticks) will both only pick up one SSID. There should be five or six from neighbour's houses, as well as my own router's SSID here. As far as I'm aware, both adapters are working fine, but I can always double-check that on another machine.

2) The IP address for the wifi card is always an IP addy starting 169.254, which I believe indicates that Windows isn't being allocated an IP address by the router (the router works fine with all my other stuff here, BTW, and is broadcasting its SSID loud and clear). The subnet mask is wrong too - 255.255.0.0, when it should be 255.255.255.0.

I've tried giving the adapters static IP addresses within the dynamic IP pool of my router, but no joy.

I've tried using both Windows and the adapter's own connection management software, but have the same problems on each. I don't use both at the same time, as I know that can cause problems.

I'm not sufficiently savvy to know precisely which entries should appear in the wifi network's properties tab (I can see the usual TCP/IP protocol, printer and file sharing, etc, but there was some Novell Netware entry too, as well as other stuff, but no WLAN protocol, as far as I remember).

Any help re-establishing normal wifi functionality (ie, detecting more than one wifi network, and then actually being to connect to a wifi network of my choice) would be much appreciated. In the meantime, I'll test both adapters in other machines, to make sure the problem doesn't lie there.

Regards, Jon.
 
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#2 ·
Welcome to TSF,

I'd like you to do another scan and this time please use SuperAntiSpyware Free version, there's no need for you to post the log.
Remove all infections found. See if the Wi-Fi adapter appears in the Device Manager or you may also try to connect.

Also, run these commands:

Reset IPv4 TCP/IP stack to installation defaults. netsh int ipv4 reset reset.log
Reset IPv6 TCP/IP stack to installation defaults. netsh int ipv6 reset reset.log
Reset WINSOCK entries to installation defaults: netsh winsock reset catalog

Restart the computer after and test your connection again.
 
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