First of all, hi there everyone! I’m new to this forum. I had downloaded Avast just a week before this problem happened and I’m still on the test week before paying the registration fee. I used to just rely on firewalls and online virus scanners before, but I finally decided on this system just because my friends really like it.
So bear in mind that I am not at all familiar with the avast process of doing things.
Anyway, two days ago I changed internet providers. And stupid as I am, this must have meant that my firewalls were down, because I contracted a virus almost immediately. This is nothing new to me, I’ve had viruses before, and have always managed to root them out, but this time I am stumped.
I am writing this from the computer at work, because I can’t use my infected computer at home, so everything I write is from either memory or from my set of itty bitty notes. So forgive any confusion.
I use windows XP-pro
What happened was: On a small fansite for comic books, I must have contracted a virus. I did not accept anything, or click any links (I’m not stupid) but appearantly it snuck in anyway.
It took over my computer. First it changed the wallpaper to one that advertised something called ‘smart security’ because obviously my computer was infected by trojans and viruses. All my shortcuts were erased and replaced with shortcuts to sites like ‘home pharmacy’ ‘online poker’ ‘home mortages’ and so on. It changed around everything so that it suited itself, task bars, shortcuts and so on. Other things I found was ‘allcybersearch’ and a program called 124489 which was the first thing that I noted, with a picture of a cute blode as an icon.
I also think it tried to hijack my modem, but since I am not using a modem that did not work.
What it does, is that every three to five minutes, my computer restarts itself. If I try to delete the temporary internet files where the virus lie, the computer restarts itself. If I try to shut down any suspicious system processes, they restart themselves, and then finally the computer restarts itself. If I try to open internet explorer, the computer restarts itself. I can not right click anymore, that has been disabled. Needless to change, i can not make any changes to wallpapers, users, links and so on…
When I run Avast (home user), it first located memory resident trojans (a LOAD of them, but the first one I remember was JS:TrojDnldr-1), mostly in the temporary internet files folder. So it did a boot scan. I was stupid enough to press ‘remove’ because I didn’t know that you were not supposed to do that (I do now after having read this site). Hopefully not much have been damaged since they were temporary files… or the programs that the virus had added.
This did not help.
Yes, when I start Avast, the memory scans clean. But the computer is still obviously infected, because it still restarts after 3-5 minutes, so I have no time to run a through scan. Sometimes it catches a trojan, at other times not. It really haven’t much time to do anything, since I have rather many files.
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So here is my problem. I can’t do much on my PC at home since I can’t go online with it. My first problem is to find out what makes it restart itself all the time. I had that trouble about half a year ago with the sasser virus (or something like it), but I managed to work that out by going online and see how I should solve it, and worked real fast in the few minutes that I had. It worked out fine. Now I do not have that option.
So please, post what information you need here and I will take notes and go home tonight and try to find them. I have heard people refer to a hijackthis-Log, can anyone please explain what this is, and how it is obtained?
I used to be competent with computers, but that was back when there still was DOS at the heart of everything… I know very little of how windows XP work. Is there some sort of ‘simple’ failsafe mode when you start up the comptuer? If so, how do you get into in? Maybe that can help.
I miss DOS. I miss autoexec.bat and config.sys. Things felt simpler then grins.
I am going to continue searching this board (and the net) for information. Please, if anyone have any suggestions, I will be forever grateful.