Hijacked svchost.exe, hijacked Firefox, previous Antivir Solution Pro infection

Discussion in 'Malware Help - MG (A Specialist Will Reply)' started by Walley, Aug 27, 2010.

  1. Walley

    Walley Private E-2

    Howdy,

    About a month ago I managed to pick up an Antivir Solution Pro infection (fake scanner). This ensued with all the usual symptoms of a locked connection etc.

    I eventually managed to remove this with a couple of manual steps (removing relevant registry entries and files) and a scan with Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware.

    Things seemed smooth sailing for a while, but I noticed my internet connection occasionally seemed quite slow, and that Firefox was occasionally opening tabs to random locations - shopping addresses, advertising, etc. On occasion I've had attempts to open Google links also lead to such addresses.

    Becoming suspicious in terms of the connection performance I installed NetLimiter to get a bit of a view on whether anything was hogging it up.

    What I ended up discovering was that there was an instance of C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe connecting to an external IP with a lot of outbound traffic - enough to completely bog down my connection. Below's a screenshot of the view of that in NetLimiter (shows the outbound address and the high traffic can be seen in the main window).

    netlimiter2.jpg

    Of recent I've also had similar outbound connections with such high traffic through services.exe, and firefox.exe. For the time being blocking the specific connections via NetLimiter allows me to hold them down for one session, but it's very hands on as they continue to crop up. Also of note is that they always seem to be to the same IP range of 178.x.x.x and 204.x.x.x.

    I've done a number of scans with various software, namely Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, SUPERAntiSpyware, Avira, and Spybot. On occasion they each found a small number of infections and removed them, presenting clean scans afterwards. However the main symptoms here of outbound connections and a Hijacked Firefox continued.

    Today I ended up running TDSSkiller (after finding TDSS fits the symptoms), which found one infection, listed as 'Win32.Rootkit.TDSS.tl3'. I had it remove this, which it seemed to do successfully - on a new scan nothing was detected, and since that I haven't been having any pop ups in Firefox - *yet*. I'll make an edit if that changes.

    However the problem of outbound connections to shady places with high traffic continues.

    How do I proceed :p?

    Thanks for your time in advance
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 27, 2010
  2. chaslang

    chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member

    Welcome to Major Geeks!

    Please read ALL of this message including the notes before doing anything.

    Please follow the instructions in the below link:

    READ & RUN ME FIRST. Malware Removal Guide


    and attach the requested logs when you finish these instructions.
    • **** If something does not run, write down the info to explain to us later but keep on going. ****
    • Do not assume that because one step does not work that they all will not. MGtools will frequently run even when all other tools will not.

    • After completing the READ & RUN ME and attaching your logs, make sure that you tell us what problems still remain ( if any still do )!
    Helpful Notes:
    1. If you run into problems trying to run the READ & RUN ME or any of the scans in normal boot mode, you can run the steps in safe boot mode but make sure you tell us what you did later when you post logs. See the below if you do not know how to boot in safe mode:
    2. If you have problems downloading on the problem PC, download the tools and the manual updates for SUPERAntiSpyware and Malwarebytes ( links are given in the READ & RUN ME) onto another PC and then burn to a CD. Then copy them to the problem PC. You will have to skip getting updates if (and only if) your internet connection does not work. Yes you could use a flash drive too but flash drives are writeable and infections can spread to them.
    3. If you cannot seem to login to an infected user account, try using a different user account (if you have one) in either normal or safe boot mode and running only SUPERAntiSpyware and Malwarebytes while logged into this other user account. Then reboot and see if you can log into the problem user account. If you can then run SUPERAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, ComboFix and MGtools on the infected account as requested in the instructions.
    4. To avoid additional delay in getting a response, it is strongly advised that after completing the READ & RUN ME you also read this sticky:
    Any additional post is a bump which will add more delay. Once you attach the logs, your thread will be in the work queue and as stated our system works the oldest threads FIRST.
     

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