PC Virus

[Pickering Snow]

Ok Fellows the fathers in crap creek without a paddle. First thanks Chuck for sending me the links to Panda and Lavasoft however this little bastard is crippling my whole network of shop computers.

Problem it occured two days ago i got this pop up for XP Anti Virus well it even has the somewhat Mircosoft logo problem is it wont allow me to do anything...... I cant even do a system restore point it says its turned off.

Everytime i try to down load Nortons latest update or the Pqanda software it says server not found, now i can acess anything else on the web from the shops computers. All anti virus protection that is legit is being denied. I have been up since 4am trying to get the dam shop computers working i canT even close out my week ends books right now....

Now for the life of Ryan what dam funtion key allows to start in safe mode that isnt even working thinking if i could run in safe mode i could update Nortons latest patch or Panda. In no short words if i could find the bastards that have nothing better to do than wreck and waste my time like this i have a custom 9mm hollow point yellow jacket i would take one of them out at a time......:mad:

Any help from computer Gurus is much needed again i have crital data i need to get done for this weeks work Napa tech is worthless has **** on a boar hog. HELP HELP HELP.

[festerw]

Fred, F8 is the key you want to press to get into the system options. You want the Safe mode with Networking option, that will allow you to still access the internet.

[Chuck Smith]

Here is what Fred's computers are infected with:

http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/Fake-Windows-XP-Security-Centre_W0QQugidZ10000000007826564

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Fake-Windows-XP-Security-Center-in-the-Wild-86269.shtml

Still looking for a fix for him :headwall

~Chuck

[festerw]

Don't know if you've tried this yet or not

http://forums.techguy.org/malware-removal-hijackthis-logs/583257-solved-fake-security-center-virus.html

[wyldman]

Got a customers laptop in for the same thing.May be faster just to wipe it and start fresh ......

[Rob]

Fred,
If you can go here (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080704154443AAyfkUx), there seem to be a couple of options for removal.

One other thought would be to try and go to TrendMicro's site and run the housecall tool. But if other anti-virus programs are being blocked, I'd guess this one is too. Here's the link to housecall (http://housecall.trendmicro.com)

HTH

[Jerre Heyer]

Fred, almost had the same thing happen. AVG caught it as it was trying to install . Don't know if you'll be able to load AVG in now that it's infected thought. Grifsoft makes the program. Thought it was a pain to keep on the computers at first but it's caught alot. Good luck. J

[Wizard]

Anyone know where this one comes from? Email virus I'm guessing? Not sure what nailed my laptop, dont think it was a virus, but XP would no longer boot properly. Ran all the troubleshooting, and still ended up starting over. What a pain... You dont realize how much crap you have on them until you have to start over... :(

[Pickering Snow]

Ok after dam near the weekend blown on this Nortons techs finally worked with me to clear my sys32 files for them to gain access to my shop pcs has we speak there working my computers fixing them while i type this from my laptop and broadband the cost 99.00 bucks.

Last night the Geek boys threw threw up 700 bucks to recover my machines not fix them , it was one kid there that was honest enough to say theres no true protection fron this virus and it didnt matter what i had running for virus protection i was screwed. So i lost a weekend basicly but saved what would have taken a week to have napa, alldata, mitchell, gm, ford and chrys softwarw put back on my machines.

Like the links Chuck posted this needs to be crimmnal offense right now i would honestly be in jail for murder in the first degree if i found the rotton bastards who are doing this. I lost a valuable repo for a bmw z-3 over this mess since we are on city county rotation i would have had to grab this one the dam Bmw was setting in a parking lot in Travserse city with a Forsale sign on it would have been a easy pic not now .

Like me and Chuck talked somehow i need to protect my pcs here before Napa it was easy to keep my pcs off the nternet but even my alldata is pc internet based to a dgreee so i dont really know what to do. I know this had we opened the shop tomarrow with crashed computers we would never have gotton threw the day .

Thanks to everyones repley and Chuck for digging so hard i guess we should all check to see if our virus protection has 24hr support like Norton has done here this am free doesnt do a dam bit of good when your crippled.

[Chuck Smith]

Got it on the shop computer this morning :mad: I saw it pop up, and turned off the PC. I am not infested yet, seems to be different than Fred's a little. Sucks. I know it is going to get worse fast. We got a job that a customer wants us to do scrapping MRI machines. I was researching them on how stuff works.com. Then I did a google image search, and clicked on the first result. That is the site that gave it to me :mad:

~Chuck

[Pickering Snow]

Got it on the shop computer this morning :mad: I saw it pop up, and turned off the PC. I am not infested yet, seems to be different than Fred's a little. Sucks. I know it is going to get worse fast. We got a job that a customer wants us to do scrapping MRI machines. I was researching them on how stuff works.com. Then I did a google image search, and clicked on the first result. That is the site that gave it to me :mad:

~Chuck

Well i know i told you Chuck but didnt follow up here my bad!!. The above post i typed on my laptop while the Norton guys were taking control over my pc it sure looked like they had it fixed 4 hours later they were finished i had to do a manuel reboot at that point the rotton virus had gotton my Boot sector has well and i ended up Reformatting my main term.

I did get Norton 360 out of the deal and i still belive had i not waited so long they probley could have done there magic , so i still say for the 99 bucks they put well over 11 hours in with me that isnt even 10 bucks a hour.

It totally sucks that people have nothing better to do than mess up someone elses life , they took away a weekend of my life when i was feeling good , and i will never forget.

One thing i also ended up doing out of that rotton deal was seperating the hub and other Pc's . Now the shop break room has one term for the guys to look up parts, and manuel info on line the other 5 computers are now offline and networked to each other for internel invoicing only.

Reading my one post we did get threw the next three days without , Napa sent there version of the Geek crew up and did all the reformatting , it took him three days to set us up on a stand alone net work system for invoicing, the program called Apache simulates a internet conn and allows us to run our little world under our roof.

[Chuck Smith]

Took a while, but I got rid of them. 17 of them in all. How? Well when my father built this computer years ago, he installed a hard drive drawer, so he could play around with Windows ME, and XP. He had a few hard drives loaded with each. Pretty cool actually. So I popped in one of the other drives, updated it A LOT, and then hooked up the infected drive as a slave. Ran a scan with AVG (free version) and it got all of them. Ran Malwarebytes too. All clear now. I am going to get all the data I need off it, and scrap it. It has some bad sectors on it. I have had a brand new drive sitting here for months.

Now the only real PIA is installing QB again, and listening to all the sales pitches when trying to just get a validation number...

One thing these viruses tried to do last night when I booted up is try to send 11 e mails, and Norton blocked them. I had rebooted again, and it tried sending 25 e mails, Norton blocked them. So these things had a payload that got worse over time.

~Chuck

[Rooster]

Sorry to hear about all your troubles, I have had to completely reformat hard drives for friends of mine.

Here are the programs I run, I have never had a severe virus problem, but I do run them 2 to 3 times a week.

Spybot Search and Destroy, Spyware Blaster, Ad-Aware, Avg free.

Also I use CCleaner to clean the hard drive and clean up the registry.
I use JkDefrag to defrag my hard drives, I have 4 of them.

All the programs are free. It is kind of a pain to run the all the time, but it keeps my computer which I built in XP came out running in top condition.

Good luck in the future being virus free!


Rick aka: Kansas Snowplow