John, It's not a virus, it's an attack.
Look in your "documents and settings" folder and you may find an exe that doesn't belong there. My take is that's just one element of the attack and that your machine is now compromised and can't be trusted. In fact, I think you were "lucky" because you discovered you had been attacked. The most insidious attack would plant something that has no symptoms until it's triggered. I've been looking into VM as a solution, but reports on it's security are not encouraging. In the post on "Google: Desktops Will Be Irrelevant In Three Years", I hypotheize that users are going to wind up supporting 2 computing worlds, one connected to the net and one not. While it's hard to really believe that, the attacks persist and are getting increasingly sophisticated. I do believe there are teams of people behind these attacks. Bill > I thought I would pass along a success story on dealing with > this terrible > virus... > > Fortunately, when I set my Dell laptop up this past August, I > initially > called the user dell_john, but decided I didn't like that, so > I created > another administrator - john - and that is what I have been > using until > yesterday when I got the dreaded virus (despite running AVG > and having all > my updates). I ran malwarebytes, superantispyware, and also downloaded > avast. > > Malwarebytes and superantispyware may have to be renamed in > order to run > because the virus is looking for those names. I also loaded > avast (free) > because it can scan the entire computer before it loads > windows (after you > reboot). > > After the virus was removed, nothing would run by just > clicking on it, some > things you had to right mouse click and run as administrator, others > wouldn't run at all. I though I was going to have to do a total > reinstall.... > > For some reason, I decided to come back in as dell_john and voila .... > everything worked. All I needed to do was boot back into the old user, > export my stuff from outlook, boot back in and import. It's all good! > > If you don't already have a second administrative user, I > would recommend > doing it quickly! > > Thanks, > > > John Harvey > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/c5a2790e907641e6a537dcc7f1b7a...@bills ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
