Hello and thanks in advance to any advice I receive here.
I have a laptop and a desktop that I will be explaining in this topic. They are on a network or they both connect to a router through a wireless connection. They both came down with symptoms within days of each other but I'm not sure when this thing started taking over. Seems like a lot of problems happened months ago but we didn't put two and two together til we knew some of the signs.
Start with the laptop- it is a compaq cq56. Has done everything we wanted it to and more most of the times. It has had some history with infections over the years and has had various issues. I thought we had it cured as it has been months since any symptoms and i have never seen these before. It seems as if something has completely embedded itself in every aspect of the laptop. I have fought off what I could to keep it up and running. I opened up control panel one day and had a java 7u17 device as my network device. Since I didn’t set it up I deleted it. Don’t know if that was the right move, its just what I did. I don’t remember ever having a network because since this computer has been infected on and off I didn’t want to connect the two. SOmething did. Another symptom is I changed by login name into windows from thomas to thomas2012 and last time back to thomas. when I did this I rebooted and I keep getting popups all the time about unvalidated windows program. Type in key code and it says i’m the victim of pirating or invalid key. I now have 16 days to fix that or windows will shut down. Windows 7 64 bit home edition was preinstalled when we bought this at a major retail chain. I have a microsoft account that I had to use genuine check to register and they won’t do anything to help. So after digging a bit deeper My recovery drive is almost maxed out when it had plenty of storage before. I read some log files somewhere that said some terrifying things like. "tried again to hide system info-send valid windows to certain place and exchange another program in its place.
I will get an action center warning that Windows Update failed 80087312x or something similar. then every once in a month maybe the free antivirus program will come up in the action center. Something about action center not finding an antivirus on the machine. Third windows defender was disabled to the point I couldn’t even get the regular menu box to come up. 100% CPU with all kinds of crazy never seen programs. I downloaded tcp viewer and seen it go from 20 programs to 250. Almost all of them fell under firefox and avast programs. Then you could see blocks of green and red highlighted sections lighting up the screen with the similarities of a worm. I’ve ran combofix in the past and feel good enough about doing it without guidance, avast, malwarebytes, s & D, and othe cleaners such as tfc, cc, adware etc. It seems as if they are all preprogramed to give off a good result.
The desktop has similar problems starting but not to this degree of issues. I somehow ended up with microsoft security essentials one day and have had problems since but it really got going off and email I opened from a contact friend who had infection. It directed me to two different malicious websites. I ran macefees serefif program after reading some of my exact symptons and it was hit and miss on saying it found or didn’t find serefif on both computers. It would clear things up----Defender came back on and cpu was low. It slowly starts creeping back in making me think it is a variation of some serefif or zero access.
Oh yes and I cant run internet explorer or otl without it stalling out saying not responding. recently