I don’t know if the following events are related, but here’s what’s been going on:
On April 11th at 11:51pm, my main Yahoo e-mail sent out spam to all of my contacts. Luckily, I have two other Yahoo accounts, and it sent the e-mails to those accounts too which pop up on my phone. I was able to go in and change the password within about 10 minutes. I ran Spybot and Malwarebytes immediately after, but nothing came up.
Off and on since then (I’m unsure of the exact date), my Adobe Flash Player hasn’t been working on Mozilla Firefox. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling it a few times without avail.
Just this morning before leaving for work, I downloaded Google Chrome (but hadn’t tried to use it) to see if I could get on Pandora and my Facebook games. I also started my computer in Safe Mode with Networking, ran Rkill, and started Spybot. On a possibly unrelated note, I tried to log in to Facebook while I was at work today, and it wouldn’t let me log in saying that the account was locked to too many unsuccessful login attempts. I immediately got on my phone to change my password, and it gave me an option to log out of everywhere. When I got home from work, it’d only found one AdMedia entry, which I fixed. I also ran a quick scan of Malwarebytes , but it didn’t find anything either. I then opened up Avast to run a boot-time scan and restarted my computer. The scan didn’t run, so I tried again. Nothing.
At this point, I get out of Safe Mode and restart, then open up Avast to check for updates. I get the ‘This program is blocked by group policy. For more information, contact your system administrator.’ Currently, the top of this box says: C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\AvastUI.exe, but the first time it had a .dll extension listed (though I can’t seem to get to it now). I’ve also gone into the Control Panel to uninstall, and a pop-up says ‘You do not have sufficient access to uninstall avast! Free Antivirus. Please contact your system administrator.’ wtf. I downloaded AVG, and it looks like it’s been stuck at 88% on file C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\Po…\ (I don’t know AVG well enough to find out which file it’s truly on). After finishing this, I’ll be restarting in Safe Mode with Networking again, and I’ll try and AVG scan again.
This is a personal home computer, not in a home network (apart from using the wireless printer), and the only account is my main/administrator one without a password. I am able to use Firefox, but Chrome will not open. I’m not sure if Avast stopped working before or after downloading Chrome, so I was going to uninstall it, but it’s not working.
Were there updates to Avast and/or Chrome lately that clashed?
Update: So when I went into Safe Mode, I decided to attempt to uninstall Avast again…and it worked! I was also able to uninstall Chrome. Ran Rkill again, and Spybot is currently scanning. Will update as needed.