Ill computers

[davidn]

For a long time now, I'd thought that computer viruses were things only contracted by idiots and users of Internet Explorer (qualifications which it must be said often go hand in hand). But we had an infection of something at work last week that necessitated going out to buy a new hard drive, and my work laptop's just got something today as well. I'm not sure how it happened - as far as I can remember I wasn't doing anything with it that was more horrific than normal.

I got a trojan warning from Avast when things were going well on massive upgrade #3 of 4 in the middle of the day, and not too long after that, I noticed a process taking up far too much CPU time, and a pop-up advert appearing that was an Internet Explorer window trying to look like Firefox (the icon in the taskbar was wrong). Further, it seemed that some Google links were being redirected - I thought I'd just misclicked the first couple of times, but when I clicked on MalwareBytes and got a page about how to have a healthy pregnancy I was beginning to suspect that something was wrong.

Spybot caught it, it's called Virtumonde.prx and fiddles with your Internet traffic, so I've disconnected it from the network while it runs a giant scan to see if it's been successful in removing it after one reset. HijackThis couldn't seem to, though, so if that doesn't work I have Combofix and a big list of instructions to fall back on.

Comments

[pami-zee.livejournal.com]

I have this on my new laptop - I'm blaming a housemate since she's had it for a long time now, but since this is too new for me to have much stuff on it it's going to get formatted and reinstalled with Windows 7. It needs a nice clean anyway, I got far too much junk software with it!