spyware/virus alert!

[TheForce]

I managed to pick up a nasty trojan this morning.

The symptoms were a quick change from a very stable computer with AVG antivirus running to one that took over and scanned the internet itself and then popped up a screen that advised me I had been attacked by some 60 different spywares and trojans. Then asking me to buy protection etc.

Well, I know better than that but I know I had been bitten by this virus. I looked up the notice (on another computer) since I yanked out the ethernet cable immediately. I also learned the hard way in the past not to shut the computer down. The extortionist was "Antivirus System Pro" However, the google search was not helping since none of the remedies were giving me any useful fixes. There was a clue that did turn up on one forum. The file sysguard.exe showed up in my task mgr processes. and would sync with the activity on screen. But the file name was a bit different. It was "jetsysguard.exe and was located in the windows system folder. There was no other software added in Programs files as indicated for that extortionware listed in the google references. There was no jetsysguard.exe in google search. So I shut down the process in task manager and voila! the activity on my desktop ended. I deleted the file and then found it hidden in a new folder in Programs called "htopfl"
Finally, I found a key in the registry that referenced the file in the run section and deleted that.

Excitement is over now and time to get some sleep!

 

[navychop]

Computers are the work of the devil. :devil:

Yes, I still earn part of my living from computers.

 

[jayn_j]

Computers are the work of the devil. :devil:

Yes, I still earn part of my living from computers.

Yep. I finally found an effective anti-virus solution. I bought a Mac for e-mail and browsing and took my PC offline for design work only.

 

[navychop]

Oh, the temptation.

But we are locked into Windows for interoperability with some of our customers, and for our accounting program.

I miss Unix. (especially since I finally taught a guy to shut down gracefully, rather than pull the plug. His fingers healed.)

 

[mdonnelly]

Does it prevent you from running an exe program? Did it look something like this McAfee library entry:

FakeAlert-GA

 

[TheForce]

It didn't prevent running the exe but would pop up a warning everytime you did. BTW- I didn't look at your link. Had enough of that last night.

Computer ran flawlessly and stable all day. I had my 1920 x 1200 desktop screen with Ameritrade java loaded command center all day and it didn't reboot or cause a problem all day.

 

[DodgerKing]

Yep. I finally found an effective anti-virus solution. I bought a Mac for e-mail and browsing and took my PC offline for design work only.

MACs get virus too.

 

[navychop]

Just not as often. And I'm not a Mac guy.

 

[TheForce]

I don't use my MacBook Pro enough to comment with experience on the virus issue. I do know that the freelance FCP editors I hired would always use the excuse that their system would crash and the reason why they were always behind schedule on projects. Excuse is they had to spend so much time recovering from those crashes.

I do believe that as a group of users, PC people are far more battle hardened when dealing with viruses and other malware since we get attacked so often. PC users know as a matter of normal practice, to use a virus scanner at minimum and have it updated daily. I don't recall the last time I spoke to a Mac head who used a virus scanner.

 

[aklarvanto]

Sounds like a "System Security" virus my son catched couple months ago on his laptop. It is hiding in video codecs and can be removed manually. I did, but IE is still having issues even I fixed registry. Now he is using Google Chrome until I get his IE fixed. DO NOT BUY PROGRAM THEY'R SELLING. IT DOES NOT FIX YOUR COMPUTER.