I had planned on writing a couple of blog posts yesterday, but instead I spent the majority of the night trying to remove a virus from my computer. I’m not even sure how I got it, but I did. Hours of scanning and manual removal later, I think it’s gone. Posting will resume tonight/tomorrow.
I’ll let Weird Al say what I don’t have time to say this morning.
As best I can tell, I got my first one in 17 years (agh!) from a malicious popup ad. I didn’t want it to come to this, but I installed Adblock Plus, and so far, I’m clean.
Print publications take responsibility to not take advertisements from scammers and frauds. Online publications need to take a similar responsibility to ensure their ad agencies aren’t serving up malware. Maybe if we all run Adblock Plus until they do, they’ll get the message.
Quick lunch update: Looks like I’m going to have to reload the box. I’ve tried Malware Bytes, Spybot, AdAware, OfficeScan, and Microsoft’s antivirus. All of them cleaned files, none of them cleaned everything, and the machine still grinds to a halt with CPU usage of 100% after being up for about 5 minutes, not to mention all of my Google traffic is being redirected. Time to reload and change passwords.
As soon as you log into windows, go into task manager and stop the process (usually a bunch of letter and numbers that make no sense) run trojan remover (www.simplysup.com it’s a 30 day trial so once you’re done with it, just uninstall it) and also run smitfraudfix. Check proxy settings in internet explorer as the trojan likes to add a proxy address (usually a loopback address so also check hosts file).
Also, make sure system restore is turned off through system properties.
Hey Rob, long time no talk! I see that you have a virus that is redirecting all of your google traffic… I had something similar and was able to remove it with a tool called ComboFix. I posted the results in a blog on my site:
http://nickyt.org/?p=300
Not sure if it is the same thing or not, but this was my experience and I figured posting that would be better than posting nothing at all. :-)