Argh! Fucking hackers, fucking viruses...

[urbandruid]

Okay, so here's the short version of the story. I'm surfing along the other day, Saturday morning I think it was, and all of a sudden IE is going NUTS (yeah, more then usual) and I'm getting crazy popups everywhere, half of which are for porn sites and viagra, the other half for 'virus' scans, or messages warning me that my system is infected and I'll get in trouble with my boss & my spouse (no lie, one of them told me this.)

Turns out, I have the latest virus sensation that's sweeping the internet, some IE malware bug. Which I've now been trying to get rid of for three days. Most of yesterday was spent trying to get Anna to boot at all- she took this opportunity to have one of her little "haha, I'm trying to make like a Gateway and blow up" moments. I refer to these as Anna's little nervous breakdowns.

Anyway. Went out Sunday and bought the biggest, baddest new version of Norton I could find, which I'd been meaning to do anyway. Took it home, took a long nap, got up and started trying to install it. Turned out my older Norton stuff was SO old I had to uninstall it all before installing the new software.

I could have been smart and uninstalled things a piece at a time, replacing them with the new software before moving onto the next one. I wasn't smart. I downlodaded a huge Norton uninstaller, proceeded to run it, and let it reboot my system.

Cue crashes, fatal system errors, and lots of swearing. I went to bed Sunday night with things still screwed up.

Somehow yesterday I got it from fatal system errors to Anna's usual nervous breakdown crap, which I kind of know how to fix- you leave it alone for a few hours, come back, and keep trying to boot from a disk until it takes instead of crashing.

So now we're back in business, kind of, except that I can't use IE for anything without getting popups and freaking Norton the hell out. Add to this the fact that my connection's making like I'm back on dialup instead of DSL. Put it to you this way- I'm writing this on Mom's laptop, which IS on dialup, and it now seems to be running pretty fast to me.

So. I've run Norton, couple times. Run Adaware, couple times. Downloaded Spybot Search & Destroy today and am now running that. When that's done I figure on upgrading downloading Windows updates, upgrading IE... and downloading Firefox. It's not like I LIKE IE, just that it's all I've got, unless you count the anciet (4.7) version of Netscape I use mostly for my email. ...Yeah. I don't like change sometimes, what can I say?

Anyway. In case anybody's been wondering where I've been- well, there you go.

Oh, and if anybody's got any suggestions- been there, had this and got rid of it?- HELP! Email's about the only thing I can still get to without risking more crap trying to download itself, so I should be okay for reading comments.

And can I just mention how much this is sucking? I don't have that much vacation time left, and this isn't how I planned on using it.

...and sorry, I guess that was the 'not so short' version, but this has kind of been annoying me and I wanted to vent a little.

Comments

[vayshti.livejournal.com]

I had Virtumonde a few months ago - is it that on your computer?

If so it was a bitch to remove, and I did it manually by going into the registry and deleting all registry changes made over the last few days.

[urbandruid.livejournal.com]

Yep, that was one of the 31(!) things Spybot Search & Destroy found that Norton didn't. What a pain in the ass! Thanks for linking to that info about it in your post, btw, because that's EXACTLY what I had. The wiki now links to a removal tool, btw, which I'm gonna run just to be sure. Bloody antivirus software. We pay for this crap, the least it could do is catch this junk.

Am still laughing, btw, at your computer having virtual herpes. Guess mine did too.

[vayshti.livejournal.com]

The freebie tool will tell you most of the dodgyness, but won't remove it unless you buy the full version. I used a combo of spybot S&D and the tool mentioned there to find most of the suckers, and then did the manual plucking of files from the reg and sys32 folder to make sure it couldn't reinstall itself.

Because it was sly enough to hide and reinstall itself on rebooting...

good luck, and I hope that my earlier pain means yours will now be much, much shorter.

With less pustulant sores ;-).

[urbandruid.livejournal.com]

Holy frak, there are 200 some odd registry values that don't belong there. This... is gonna take a while.

[vayshti.livejournal.com]

Ow! That's a LOT. I don't remember mine being that extreme. Are you going by what the tool says, or by the date/time on the file?

[urbandruid.livejournal.com]

Was going by what the tool says, since I couldn't find any date/time stuff. Oh, and some simple logic- if it looked like porn, or one of the bogus spyware programs this thing tried to get me to download, away it went.