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    Windows Virus/Trojan

    Today I spent 4 hours at a woman's house working on her PC. I got roped in by Frank to go visit his step-mom, before we head out on the town tonight for the pubs. Frank's step-mom is a nice lady in her mid 60's. So I downloaded Malwarebyte trial had to boot her Vista box in Safemode with Networking and ran a full scan. Two hours later I checked 198 items found...

    I was beyond shocked. But I ticked all the boxed and they went away. Rebooted and the PC still would not load the web (explorer is a horrid browser) I brought up the Task Manager and found several processes running vzele.exe with other variants and identified as BitDefender or sometimes BitNefender. All the processes pointed to user/<her name>/... roaming... etc. So I rebooted in safemode, opened the roaming, and sorted by date. I could see they all fell on 12/30/2013 and had obvious random names. I recycled them and rebooted.

    This seems to have solved the problem. I suggested she could try any flavor of Linux to reduce the problems. No sale, she is hooked in by playing those silly Big Fish and puzzle games. Then after Frank and I left he explained this happens a lot (in his opinion) because she downloads videos and burns them on DVD. Granny the video pirate! LoL

    I don't judge people. But really I don't think there is anyway to get a virus/trojan from a movie. As I told him the file has to execute and more likely was on one of the games or came in as a toolbar. She had way too many toolbars to be effective. I am into medical science and not all that computer science.

    Happy New Year! See you in 2014...

    #2
    Originally posted by Simon View Post
    But really I don't think there is anyway to get a virus/trojan from a movie. As I told him the file has to execute and more likely was on one of the games or came in as a toolbar. She had way too many toolbars to be effective.
    Some torrents come with .exe "toolbars". The other classic is "codec packs"... wouldn't surprise me if it was either of those.

    My heart always sinks when I see a browser with loads of toolbars installed... never a good sign.

    Happy New Year to you too!
    samhobbs.co.uk

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      #3
      My Mom (75) has about 4 of them. But of course, it's not her crap that causes her viruses, it's my daughter watching videos on You Tube

      Please Read Me

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by oshunluvr View Post
        My Mom (75) has about 4 of them. But of course, it's not her crap that causes her viruses, it's my daughter watching videos on You Tube
        How does that result in loads of toolbars?
        samhobbs.co.uk

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          #5
          No no child...

          ...my mother installing toolbar after toolbar and loads of other crap leads to her virus's. She blames my daughter for the virus's.

          Please Read Me

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by Feathers McGraw View Post
            My heart always sinks when I see a browser with loads of toolbars installed... never a good sign.
            I'm sure most have seen this one:


            Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007
            "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock Holmes

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              #7
              Originally posted by oshunluvr View Post
              No no child...

              ...my mother installing toolbar after toolbar and loads of other crap leads to her virus's. She blames my daughter for the virus's.
              Pahaha, /sarcasm next time please! I'm ashamed I missed that one.
              samhobbs.co.uk

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                #8
                Originally posted by Snowhog View Post
                I'm sure most have seen this one:


                I hope someone did that on purpose... I always wonder why people don't notice the waste of screen space when they accidentally install a new toolbar!

                I think that's probably one of the single greatest things about Linux - free software is readily available from the repos - you don't need to install from somewhere that bundles a Yahoo toolbar with whatever you actually wanted to install!
                samhobbs.co.uk

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                  #9
                  Holy moly!
                  Linux because it works. No social or political motives in my decision to use it.
                  Always consider Occam's Razor
                  Rich

                  Comment


                    #10
                    LOL well that example is a mite extreme! LOL

                    But, when I was volunteering at Castle Cops there were people coming to the site in droves with hundreds of things on their Windows computers, Most of it just "malware" but quite often some really nasty stuff

                    However, one thing I noticed was that quite a lot of the people who were "disabled and retricted to their home" in some way or another or elderly and just had no clue.

                    Most times really not their fault.

                    and happy new years also the ball just dropped.

                    woodsmoke

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by woodsmoke View Post
                      Most times really not their fault.
                      You're right...partly it's due to too many popup messages, some written by software developers and some written by Microsoft. After a while, it becomes tempting to stop reading them and just click OK.

                      This happens less in Linux (fewer popups in general), and having to enter your password instead of click OK like a normal popup when you need SU privileges makes you think about it a bit more.
                      samhobbs.co.uk

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                        #12
                        Another useful tool for cleaning up a computer is CCleaner. I use it a lot when I run into a situation like this. I hate toolbars and remove all of them. Toolbars can drastically slow down your browsing experience because when you open a browser with a lot of toolbars they all start calling home to all the links they contain. The other thing that really slows down a Windows Computer is all of the programs that automatically load at startup. CCleaner is a good tool to deal with those. It's also a good tool for cleaning up the registry.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          @oshunluvr: Yes you have to watch out for those dreaded You Tube viral videos.

                          @Snowhog: That is almost as bad as Frank's step-mom. But no seriously hers opens on Yahoo as a homepage with 25% of the top of her monitor being toolbars and such both sides of the yahoo page itself was ad banners. Leaving about 25 to 30% for real information.

                          @Feathers McGraw: I really wish I could have talked her into Linux because running Vista is only going to result in more issues for her. I totally agree with you, the distros are not perfect but they have a better watchdog than anything else.

                          @Woodsmoke: Happy New Year! I had something called "Incredible Hulk" Hpnotiq liqueur and cognac. I drank it, I think it drank me back.

                          @Detonate: I remember having tons of those programs in XP. I had Spyware Blaster, Hackthis!, Spybot S&D, Crap Cleaner (as you said), and a slew of others. I might have downloaded more but the trial version of Malwarebytes seems to cover a lot of area.

                          Welcome to 2014!

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Originally posted by Feathers McGraw View Post
                            Pahaha, /sarcasm next time please! I'm ashamed I missed that one.
                            What?!? No Sarcasm?!?

                            I'm not sure that's possible...

                            Please Read Me

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Eh, Feathers is still new here, but (s?)he's showing all signs of the usual KFN corruption assimilation

                              Comment

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