I don't normally come across virus's or for that matter spend time with them, but this evening I did and to cut a Long story short this was a mix of malware and/or a very very nasty virus from a computer running XP sp3 fully patched with AVG 8.5.
By the time I got to it it was in a sad state, with two icons on the desktop for pornotube and some other website, plus every 2 minutes approx a fake Windows Security Alert would pop up telling you that there was such and such a trojan worm found and to fix the problem download and install antimalware.
Obviously I didn't install it, but uninstalling it (the AntiMalware fake antivirus product) made no difference, I couldn't stop the popups.
In Task MAnager a process appeared called settdebugx.exe, removing it was my first priority and to do so i had to delete all files in the users temp folder and remove two reg files in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\RUN
Ok, that was done, but even after removing that I could not install Microsoft Security Essentials, it kept on erroring out during the install with a failure
Event ID 7023 The microsoft Antimalware Service service terminated with the following error. The binding handle is invalid
I later found out that another hidden virus (service) was stopping the installation of this along with stopping me from installing malwarebytes or hijackthis.
In addition the task manager showed every two minutes or so two processses starting up, iexplore.exe and ctfmon.exe, if i left them running the pc would freeze soon after.
I then downloaded Microsofts RootKit Revealer which listed something called H8Srts, a hidden service (many times....). this was the virus that was causing me the issues !
Removing that involved going to this website to download TDSSKiller, and running that file, which found the hidden service and told me to delete it by typing delete, i rebooted, it was gone, finally and finally i could install antivirus software,
what a night, what a mess and I really feel sorry for normal users that are exposed to nasty virus's like this one, I can't imagine how they'd cope with it at all other than a format/reinstall.
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I don't normally come across virus's or for that matter spend time with them, but this evening I did and to cut a Long story short this was a mix of malware and/or a very very nasty virus from a computer running XP sp3 fully patched with AVG 8.5.
By the time I got to it it was in a sad state, with two icons on the desktop for pornotube and some other website, plus every 2 minutes approx a fake Windows Security Alert would pop up telling you that there was such and such a trojan worm found and to fix the problem download and install antimalware.
Obviously I didn't install it, but uninstalling it (the AntiMalware fake antivirus product) made no difference, I couldn't stop the popups.
In Task MAnager a process appeared called settdebugx.exe, removing it was my first priority and to do so i had to delete all files in the users temp folder and remove two reg files in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\RUN
Ok, that was done, but even after removing that I could not install Microsoft Security Essentials, it kept on erroring out during the install with a failure
I later found out that another hidden virus (service) was stopping the installation of this along with stopping me from installing malwarebytes or hijackthis.
In addition the task manager showed every two minutes or so two processses starting up, iexplore.exe and ctfmon.exe, if i left them running the pc would freeze soon after.
I then downloaded Microsofts RootKit Revealer which listed something called H8Srts, a hidden service (many times....). this was the virus that was causing me the issues !
Removing that involved going to this website to download TDSSKiller, and running that file, which found the hidden service and told me to delete it by typing delete, i rebooted, it was gone, finally and finally i could install antivirus software,
what a night, what a mess and I really feel sorry for normal users that are exposed to nasty virus's like this one, I can't imagine how they'd cope with it at all other than a format/reinstall.
cheers
niall
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