Hijack taskmanager

Hii everyone,

I have avast free 6 in my computer along with the free versions of malwarebytes and superantispyware. Couple of days back I noticed that my task manager was greyed out when I right clicked on the task bar. I ran mbam and found pum.hijack.taskmanager. I then removed it and restarted my computer. However today I also found the same thing, my task manager being greyed out and then mbam finds pum.hijack.taskmanager.
So it has come back. Avast did not give me any warning.
So my questions are,

  1. How do I get rid of it completely?
  2. How bad is this virus/malware?
  3. How do I protect myself in future?

My system is Windows 7 64 bit.

Your help is highly appreciated.
Thanks, Sam.

You might want to give MBAM scan in safe mode a shot. Also, try the Avast Boot time scan.
http://www.schmahl.net/avastbootscan.php

Thanks. Right now I am in the middle of full scan using mbam. As soon as that is done, I will follow your advice.

Sounds good. If you need instructions on getting into safe mode (google search is easier though) or if those suggestions don’t work, feel free to come back and ask!

Out of curiosity, do you have Superantisptware set to lock task manager …or the control panel…I uninstalled my Superanispware temporarly so I can’t actually see …But I know that SAS Free, does have “the options” to lock a few things in its settings…Malwarebytes scans find this as a Hijacking…Just a wild guess…
Cheers and safe surfing!!!

I did mbam full scan in safe mode, found nothing.
Then I did the boot level scan with avast and found 8 items which i then moved to the chest. They were all java agents which was classified as trojan and their severity was ranked high by avast.
What should I do next?

I dont think superantispyware is doing that @ Daris. I checked the settings but I could not find any option where it could do that.

Thanks again.

Good to hear avast found some problems and got rid of them.

Now how about the hijack task manager issue, is it still present?

I figured out one thing about the task manager hijack issue. I have a program called winrap which hides other programs from being viewable. Now when I put the winrap program in tray mode where it cant be seen, thats when the task manager becomes greyed out. So I think winrap is doing that. It does not look to be a virus or malware. I downloaded the program from sourceforge so I believe its good. Any comments about this?

And what should I do with the viruses that avast found in the boot time scan? Anything else that needs to be done to make my system secure?

That’s weird. Haven’t tried winrap, but sourceforge is known to be a reputable site.

Might just be a bug of the program. Might want to ask in the program’s forum to see if it’s a known problem: http://sourceforge.net/projects/winrap/forums/forum/1010364

As for the viruses in the chest, you don’t have to do a darn thing. When they’re in the chest, they are completely disarmed and harmless to your computer. Leave them in there if you want, for as long as you want. If you know that they aren’t false-positives and don’t care for them being on your computer any longer, you can just delete the files from the chest.

As a general rule though, we usually recommend to keep files that have been identified by avast as a virus in the chest for 2 weeks. That allows you to decide if the files were important or not, allows you to scan them later with newer virus definitions (to make sure it wasn’t just a false positive), or what-have-you.

If you delete them, there’s no way of getting them back, so hold on to them as long as you need to.