Infected! - Your Virus Stories

[TheGreatSatan]

So I was looking at a computer at work yesterday for a friend because it was infested with a Virus disguised as Anti-Virus called XP Anti-Virus 2008.

It stops you from installing Norton, McAfee, AVG and others. It pops up and disables your screensaver and wallpaper. You won't be able to access them! I used my flash drive (Corsair Survivor 32GB; the one I reviewed here at TBCS) to install Avast and Adaware with no success. Needless to say, I was unable to fix it.

Today I wanted to update my daughter's computer. I put my flash drive in and Boom! she had the virus too!! Unknown to me it hitched a ride from the infected PC I looked at earlier.

I ran Avast!, AVG, Adaware, and spybot, but nothing worked.

After a couple of hours of research I discovered MalwareBytes. With a quick 3 minute scan it found and removed the virus. I rebooted and everything was back to normal

Next, I ran a scan on my flash drive and deleted the trojan. Then My flash drive stopped working all together. I had to reformat my Flash Drive and reload all my backed up files.

What have you experienced?

[noopypoop]

Heh, this is just after i got a virus on my mom's pc. It hiijacked the web browsers, making all major search engine results(google yahoo live search etc) redirects to ad sites. It blocked access to all ways of getting an antivirus(and even if you found a site it didnt block, it corrupted all downloads so they wouldnt load.Then it didnt let you open notepad(to prevent you from changing system text files it had edited) We were afraid to back up all the stuff to a usb drive and reformatting because the virus could spread to the external drive(as had happened to TGS) So my mom ended up paying mcafee $90 to remotely access her computer and get rid of the virus. The computer is working fine, all is well, but now im never even aloud to touch that computer again.

[crenn]

Want virus-ville? Come to my uni, your flash drives will have a 95% of being infected. I notice the viruses because it writes 2 system hidden files, one of them being autorun.ini. (btw TGS, that's what was 'wrong' with your drive).

[BerticusPryme]

I was at a lan party. Everything was going good. Long night of killing folks in CoD4. Well we all camped out and went to sleep. Couple of the guys stayed up late. I wake up the next morning adn check my email and the computer is going crazy. I look down at the bottom and now have 143 IE windows open. Apparently my anti virus got shut down while I was gaming cuz off some error that casued the game to crash. Well I was feeling froggy so i did a scan of the network we were on. Then i found it. When someone at the lan is abusing the 10mb pipe and downloads 5gb of pron from bearshare and then plays in everyones shared drive for music and such it results in a bad day. We found the system that casued it all after teh fact. Total infections on my rig was 3576. I was the system with the least infections. We later got even for that.

[TheGreatSatan]

Holy crap!

[OvRiDe]

My Dad picked up that XP Antivirus 2008, its quite the buggar.. but I gotta say Google is your friend.

(Google search for "Antivirus 2008")

http://www.google.com/search?q=antiv...ient=firefox-a

The top 7 hits are how to remove it.

I picked the BleepingComputer.com link, mainly because they are one of the best forums for virus, malware, spyware stuff, and had him fixed up in about 15 minutes.

At our office we are always running into this stuff, mainly because our managemnet staff talked our senior staff into making us give them local administrator rights on their PC's. Slowly we are demonstrating through these viruses why they shouldn't have local administrator rights on their PC's.

I highly recommend Bleepingcomputer.com if you run it problems in the future.

[TheGreatSatan]

I went to Bleepingcomputer.com and even joined the site to get what I needed. I just felt that their site is confusing and difficult to navigate. I did try the manual removal at first, but it was far too extensive. I like it easy. Problem with searching via Google, Yahoo, etc. is that when you search for "Anti-Virus 2008" you get lots of hits from places saying that they can remove it with no real evidence that they can. Finally I went to Microsoft's site and did a search. Several forums are linked to them and that's where I found MalwareBytes.org

I had testimony from those forum members whose systems it worked for and peace of mind in knowing that the FREE version is what they used.

[OvRiDe]

Well you did end up in the right place.. as far as I know.. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is just about the only scanner that will remove it automagically! And I agree the manual process is quite lengthy. I just don't understand why the other AV guys haven't put something in their products to fix it yet or even detect it! It's been around for the better part of a year now.

[TheGreatSatan]

I guess for some people it's a HUGE problem, and for them a non-existant one.

[Drum Thumper]

I've been lucky so far--not a single virus. Ever. Been surfing the internet since its' public debut as well. However, that's not to say that I haven't had roommates who've been hammered by viruses. One of my former roommates picked up a virus similar to the one TGS got a few years back. Here's the kicker: his laptop didn't have a wireless connection, so he went and bought a PCMCIA wireless card. Installed went flawlessly, and within five minutes his machine was infected. Severely infected.

All from some shady pr0n site.

All told, I think he spent a good $150 getting it fixed--took the tech a bit longer than he anticipated to fix it.