For a long time, I've prided myself on my lack of ever getting a computer virus. Not that it's super common to get one, but I've never purchased anti virus software or gone out of my way to setup personal firewalls, etc. The most I've ever done is run Spybot, which apparently has been good enough. Until now.
I came home Thursday night and sat down to launch World of Warcraft only to be presented with a very strange error message. Couple googles later, and I was already in panic mode. Few more checks and it was clear I had a pretty bad virus. Task Manager disabled, registry editing disabled, and generally negative behavior on most applications.
I'm no hacker expert, nor am I that versed in manual combat of viruses. I tried a few things, eventually found ways to get into both my task manager and registry. Both were pretty fruitless efforts. This virus was very strong and keeping itself alive, and keeping me from doing anything that might even give me a chance. It completely destroyed the Safe Boot portion of the registry, so that wasn't even an option. (I tried a manual restore of the Safe Boot registry, and it worked... but the virus was resident even in Safe Boot)
I ended up buying Norton Antivirus, which I sort of wish I hadn't. It was a giant waste of time, (and money?) as this virus laughed at Norton. Eventually Norton was detecting it's own files as infected. It was quite clear I only had one option left: Reformat.
So, 48 hours and 2 reformats later, I'm finally back up and running. World of Warcraft is currently at about 50% installed. The experience was interesting, especially when I ended up in a Norton Antivirus chatroom with some random dude from India, who then proceeded to say they could fix all my virus problems for the low low fee of $99.99. Yeah, I passed on that.
After all was said and done, we really only lost ONE thing, and it's my fault for not backing it up. Andrea had been recording our spending habits for the past year and a half on this one excel file. In my haste of backing things up the first night, it was the one big thing I missed. Hopefully it won't dissuade her from keeping it going in the future, as I think it was very useful for us.
1 comment:
Been there and done that twice in the last 6 months. I got a bad virus on my machine and whether it was the virus or just coincidence my hard drive ended up dying too so had to replace it. About 2 months later my dads machine picked up a really bad virus. We are still fighting that but he was wanting a new machine anyway so went and got a nice one. We may have the one on his old machine close to being beat but if he is root-kitted and that is likely I would never trust it without reformatting. I really feel these days you are better off reformating. I would highly recommend Antimalewarebytes Anti-Malware as one of the more effective clean-up tools I have seen. I would also recommend Spybot Search and Destroy. Though it helps with clean it is better for prevention. There are some really nasty bugs out there these days. It is amazing what all they can do. Prople do not seem to want much internet regulation but if it would help clear up some of the spam and malware I would be for it I think.
Phad/Phil
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pakers@akers.com
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