what a mess...

Discussion in 'Malware Help - MG (A Specialist Will Reply)' started by jedandjess, Jan 6, 2006.

  1. jedandjess

    jedandjess Private First Class

    Hi all

    I consider myself to be above averagely pc literate, and having been online for about 10 years now I know the internet for it's good points and it's downfalls. As time went on, since the late 90's the spyware / adware situation has become way more oppressive.

    For the most part I've been lucky but having not had internet access for 3 years I just recently got a new adsl line and within 2 days of getting online my pc ground to a halt. After a check with some free programs such as microsofts antispyware I found about 80 malicious programs and cleaned them all. The computer was moving at normal speed again, but I decided to reformat again anyway. So I saved all the free programs I'd need to protect the pc from the start (many of which are listed in the sticky in this forum) and reinstalled windows. After setting up the various anti spyware / adware programs and installing a firewall everything has been okay and now I'm more security conscious. That was until today.

    I visited one website to look at a review of a DVD and suddenly 20 popups started splashing all over the screen. I checked the state of the net connection and I was downloading at full speed (unsure what exactly) for about 12 minutes, then my homepage changed to about:blank www.updatesystempage.com and I found 6-10 programs had installed themselves on my pc. Also, the anti adware programs that were runnign are now not running. Hijackthis showed many suspicious entries which I've removed but it still hasn't solved the problems entirely. Every 2 seconds I get an alert noise and a popup telling me someone is watching my pc and taking password details, and if I dont pay some money for a removal program i'm in trouble.

    After some checking up I think I know how to remove this problem ( the stickys in this forum are most helpful ) but to be honest with the time and headache involved I'd rather format the pc and reinstall fresh. My point is, some of this stuff is so infective it is so much easier and quicker to just format and start over than to (try) to remove it. I think it would be in most peoples interest unless youre well up on security to have a backup disk or harddrive and just work light, or use a different pc to surf the internet with. I still can't believe how rotten the interenet has become this past decade.
    I appreciate the guides and advice laid out here though. See you all in a few days.:)
     
  2. chaslang

    chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member

    Formatting is not an option for many people. They just do not have the knowledge to do all that is necessary and may not even have boot CDs to do it.

    Then you have to reinstall all updates for you OS, all software you use including protection software, retweak everything as desired ....etc. It is way beyond many users capabilities and also many have no way to backup important data.

    Formatting and reinstalling everything and tweaking etc does take a significant amount of time too. Especially if you do not already have WinXP SP2. Does it take as long as running all the scans....in some cases yes. Depends on how much you have to reinstall and tweak.

    There have been very few cases here where we needed to format inorder to resolve a problem with malware.
     

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