I’ve had an interesting weekend with viruses on this compy. I don’t really have it licked, yet either.
It started with an email Friday from La Angela saying that the background changed to an adware warning, and a bugs screen saver kicked in. Hoo, boy. What I discovered knows many names, apparently, and they’re all recent.
The gruesome details escape me, but a virus scan (using Avast Free Version) showed nothing initially, nor did Ad-Aware yield any fruit. It took most of Friday researching to track down a pair of files (ctfmona.exe and ctfmonb.bmp) that were the offending (a) virus, and (b) background. Hadn’t found the damned bugs, yet.
Saturday saw the return of everything. Using Process Explorer I found a rogue program sitting there running, downloading the programs I kept deleting. “Well, that’s the end of that.” If only…
Sunday everything returned again. I found everything I had removed over the weekend, and deleted it again. I also found that damned bug screen saver, too, thank Jebus.
Actually, Monday - Wednesday went pretty damned well, except late Wednesday night found me noticing a lack of sound through web browsers (meaning videos like Youtube, etc are video only, no audio). I spent an inordinate amount of time Wednesday thinking my sound card was bad, or my audio drivers were, before realizing that it only affected web browsers and nothing else; i. e. my music plays fine on any other installed software.
Today, I start researching that problem, and learn that I can’t access “Internet Options” in Internet Explorer 7.0 through the menu. I can access the file directly, though, so that’s even weirder. So far, none of the solutions found on the internet have borne fruit.
Oh, and to top it all off, one of many instances of svchost.exe (a generic host process Windows uses to run certain programs) will for no reason “spike” the computer to 100% usage. So far I’ve not looked into that, trying to work on my menu problem first.
So I finally re-retrieved Spybot: Search and Destroy to work along with Ad-Aware. I’ve run the Spybot scan and am currently running ad-aware for the 7th time in as many days. We’ll see how this all ends up; if I find solutions I’ll let both of my faithful readers know.
One Comment
Dude! All those svchost things are sending out crap and do all sorts of other nasty malicious crap. Look into Comodo BoClean, it’s free and very effective. I had something similar happen to me and it took me FOREVER to clean up from it and in the meantime my machine was slave to some assface spammer who was using it to send a bunch of viagra spam to people. Sorry about your woes, hope your compy gets well soon.