Tuesday, November 18, 2008

When things just don't work

Last night I was working until a little late trying to get some reports to work. To generate these reports, it takes about 5 hours. But the surprise I was getting was that after about 5 hours the report generation tool would crash mysteriously. Nothing logged, just simply apparently the application would stop responding correctly. Very painful. But that wasn't all...

While I was in this pain and running multiple tests on this service, I was playing around on my windows box looking at random sites to see if there was anything close to a project I want to work on. While I was going through this almost-random search, I came across some very fishy sites. But I was in the middle of lots of things going on and, by accident, I clicked on download/open (which was by reflex) an .exe file! ARGH!

Note that I do have an anti-virus running on that computer. But it didn't quite work. It detected that something was wrong, but too late. Next thing I knew, my computer auto-rebooted. Then when it came back up, the antivirus was off. Not long after that, I got popups from Windows Security saying that my computer was contaminated but they could help. They scanned my computer for me and said that I had 37 infected files and I only needed to pay something like $60 to fix it. Even if I really wanted to pay, of course I wouldn't be that idiotic to enter credit card information when there is some sort of trojan installed on my computer.

So I went to McAfee, which the antivirus I use, and turned on full firewall to isolate myself from the web. Ran a full scan. Found 17 infected files and quarantined them. But I kept getting the warning from Windows Security. So I've restarted the computer.

Everything seemed normal. No more messages, my antivirus was turned back on. I was starting to be less worried... When... Another reboot. And we are back to the previous state.

Now I'm running another virus scan, but ready to get all the user files I have on that computer and start over. I don't use it for much more than games, but game files are huge! It's late, so I guess I'll have to wait until tonight to continue fighting the good fight. Right now I've even disconnected the computer physically from the network.

Oh, joy...

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Boa Sorte!
Aconteceu a mesma coisa no computador da Tatyana, foi um inferno para apagar.
MInha sugestão:
1o instale e execute o spybotSD atualizado.
2o instale e execute o AVG free edition atualizado
Deixe ligado o módulo Teatimer do Spybot para evitar as alterações do registro que esse trojan executa e que permita que ele volte.
Se isso não funcionar, posso ainda indicar o nome dos outros 2 antivirus que tive que usar específicos para esse trojan, que agora não lembro o nome, mas tenho no computador de casa salvo.
Depois de executar esses mencionados 4 antivirus na seqüência, rebootar desconectado fisicamente da internet em modo de segurança e rodar de novo os 4, consegui apagar todos os vestígios.