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Ok, so today I tried to update the USB driver for our video camera as it wouldn’t run and copy etc in win7 (it’s a really old camera) Tried to download a driver from the internet and instead got a Malware *thing* called SmileFiles even though the files I DL’d was clearly labelled with the driver name for our JVC video camera…
It completely blew past the AVG which didn’t detect any problems with it and what it then processed to do was delete every single shortcut and icon on the desktop and the start menu itself in favour of one big smiley face which of course took you to their torrent site and nowhere else. I couldn’t uninstall it, delete it, nothing, in the normal manner
It turned out that while all the icons/shortcuts etc were gone, the programs themselves were still there and I could get to the win explorer through “Computer” through the start button and from there into Chrome etc.
Searching the net it says to get Malwarebytes (already had it) and to run that which I did and which found it ok and quarantined it. After that I was able to seemingly kill it through add/remove programs as usual. I then had to remove this thing called ‘websearches’ that had hijacked chrome and that said to go and open ‘chrome explore’ which doesn’t seem to exist and even google help forums where this is asked about on many instances only had a ‘click the icon’ response (there IS NO freaking icon!) or no response at all… google being useless as usual.
Anyway further searching said to run malwarebytes again, which I did, but I’m surprised it didn’t pic it up before, but this time it did and I quarantined it… didn’t work. Websearches still came up when I opened Chrome.
So I did a hard reset of all settings in chrome and then deleted the shortcut, removed chrome itself through add/remove and then downloaded chrome again… it seems to have done the trick as it doesn’t open anymore and I get my normal Chrome homepage of google.com
But SmileFiles has one more trick up it’s fucking sleeve. It’s also removed a bunch of activation codes, most notably from Microsoft Office 2007, which came with the laptop pre-installed by the education department so I don’t have the code or the packaging or whatever to re-enter that. I’m going to have call the laptop support once I’m at work on Monday and see what they have to say about that…
Frankly I’m not adverse to just re-imaging the entire laptop. We have an F10 to do that from a HDD partition but we need a password for it, and that means calling IT support on Monday anyway.
A re-image isn’t a big deal really because since I have a shitty little 128Gb HDD the only stuff on it is program files stuff with 90Gb of that taken up by standard edu dept. and operating system stuff and the re-image partition (still only have 40Gb free after that, which is then taken up by any other application you choose to add, like Adobe CS6, leaving only 11Gb of actual free space..). All my personal files are on my external 1Tb drive so I won’t lose a thing by re-imaging.
So for the moment now I’m running a full anti-virus scan to see if there are anymore surprises, and manually re-adding all the start menu shortcuts again.
Bleah…
Sean
Re-image the laptop, then install ESET NOD32 Antivirus, a paid antivirus program. When asked enable the ‘block potentially unwanted programs’ option.
AVG has been going down the drain in the past year or so, it really sucks nowadays.
a guy on deviantart who claims to be a computer tech repairer since 1987 suggested iobit.com’s advanced care DL and their malware protector.
I DL’d and ran both. The Advanced Care thingy cleaned off about 3000 files and freed up 20 GIGAbytes of junk files space on the HDD and the malware cleaned a few things malwarebytes had missed. Everything seems to be working smoothly still so they don’t appear to have done any damage…
Still going to nuke it from orbit with the re-image though – its the only way to be sure…
While many such cleanup programs as the one suggested by a guy on deviantart (what a great source to quote… imagine writing a paper on computer security and quoting ‘a guy on deviantart’ as a source) do help in clearing up the trash such awful programs leave, it’s not a certainty that you’re clean. Best solution indeed is to nuke it.
Macs are different. Their security is different from Windows, much more limited. On Mac I would feel fine running ESET to clean up a minor malware infection. On Windows? Windows lets every piece of shit program in, and once it’s in, it can do anything you can (and more) on the computer. Hard to be sure it’s all fixed then. Total nuke and reinstall is only way to be reasonably sure it’s okay.
I’ve nuked it from orbit… It’s the only way to be sure.
Still have to re load and reconnect thunderbird though… Busy at work at the moment
The re image comes with macaffee avg but it seemingly won’t update unless I’m at work and connected to the network there… Will gave to look into that. I’ll probably remove it in favour of something else like ESET.
What about Avast! Free avg? That seems to have some good reviews on pcmag etc
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