OT: Virus has seriously screwed my laptop

[eastlondonseagull]

Ah, the beauty of softporn. During 'research' for NSC's wonderful 'Thread Full of Beautiful Ladies' thread last week, it seems my poor old laptop at home has picked up about 30 (no joke) different Trojan viruses, which combined with an especially malicious piece of spyware software have taken over the computer and turned it into a Viagra and animal porn search engine.

Nothing works. It's somehow managed to partially disable Norton and corrupted my Spyhunter, won't let me do anything on the internet (cannot post on NSC, go to Yahoo, Hotmail, Google or any web page), and added hundreds of porn sites to my favourites. When I try to download more anti-spyware software, the download ends up corrupted. Oh, and CD drive now no-longer works.

I'd laugh, if this wasn't so serious. Deleted all temporary files yesterday and then found and erased six viruses through Norton. Five minutes later, doing nothing apart from being on line, over 1000 porn gifs, jpegs and exe's were back in my 'temp' folder and ten new viruses popped up that Norton was 'unable to fix' despite being 100 per cent uptodate.

Other than a nervous visit to PC World, is there anything I can do? Am doing in-house shifts this week, so safely typing from work computer.

Basically, it might be an idea for you lot to virus-check your computers. I'm worried that the jpegs I posted on Thread Full Of Beautiful Ladies might have infected NSC. Probably not, and hopefully some of the techies on here will say no, but I'm a little concerned!

 

[Barnet Seagull]

ad-aware - attempt to clean most of the crap off
hijack this - to see if anything else remains.

WEB SEARCH

 

[eastlondonseagull]

Tried Adaware and SpyBot. Both downloads end up corrupted. It seems to be a really malicious little bastard this bug

 

[tedebear]

we got some funny trojan horse virus on our home pc the other day also - Norton couldn't fix it until I updated the virus definitions which it doesn't do during a usual Live Update....its a separate download from the Symantec web site...

maybe you need a copy of the stuff on CD to run as you can't download anything?

 

[Kev the Ape]

Spyware has f***ed my computer up, so i took it to PC world and they are adding a antispyware thing to block spyware. But i am loseing everythink on my computer.

 

[Kev the Ape]

we got some funny trojan horse virus on our home pc the other day also - Norton couldn't fix it until I updated the virus definitions which it doesn't do during a usual Live Update....its a separate download from the Symantec web site...

maybe you need a copy of the stuff on CD to run as you can't download anything?

I had that bloody trojan virus too and i have Norton.

 

[tedebear]

try burning the downloads on this page to a cd - if you can get your cd to work?

Symantec

 

[eastlondonseagull]

Good idea, TB. CD drive works as a input device, but won't save anything. Everyone here in the office uses Macs, unfortunately, but there might be a PC somewhere I could dump stuff onto and then transfer to laptop. Will have a look.

I'm just worried that if, like Kev, I take it to PCWorld, I'll lose everything already on there.

 

[bhaexpress]

Any idea what caused it ? I have a heavy duty spyware package which might suss it. (I'm about to rebuilt a PC anyway).

 

[Brighton till i die]

mate i had an absolute mother fukker virus.

these guys http://forums.thatcomputerguy.us/ were superb and i would strongly recomemnd you use them fr any future probs too!

 

[eastlondonseagull]

Any idea what caused it ? I have a heavy duty spyware package which might suss it. (I'm about to rebuilt a PC anyway).

It all started going tits up after I posted a couple of pics on that NSC thread, so I can only presume that the viruses came from the websites I nicked the pics off.

 

[eastlondonseagull]

mate i had an absolute mother fukker virus.

these guys http://forums.thatcomputerguy.us/ were superb and i would strongly recomemnd you use them fr any future probs too!

They sound like a good bet. Will have to do that from work, cos whenever I try and post anything on laptop - be it an email, forum message, or even info in a form or search engine - Internet Explorer either freezes or gets redirected to some viagra-flogging website! Bastards!

 

[bhaexpress]

Ever thought about downloading Mozilla Firedfofx ? It's almost indentical to IE except it's faster (and free). I had to download it after I developed a fault with IE which was reported to Microsoft months ago and yet I'm still waiting for a reply.

 

[Bluejuice]

As well as being faster and free it is also far, far safer than IE because very few hijackers target it (yet).

I would second the thatcomputerguy forums suggestions as they really are a great help, and also recommend Firefox heartily

 

[Barnet Seagull]

if it's definitely virus related you could do worse than download mcafee stinger and run it. It'll do a full virus scan/clean.

http://download.nai.com/products/mcafee-avert/stinger.exe

 

[bhaexpress]

if it's definitely virus related you could do worse than download mcafee stinger and run it. It'll do a full virus scan/clean.

http://download.nai.com/products/mcafee-avert/stinger.exe

I hate to say it but if EastLondon has the latest updates for Norton then downloading McAfee won't help as considerable experience of both prodiucts has shown me that the Symantic product is better and has more virus definitions.

 

[eastlondonseagull]

Thanks for all your help chaps. Have left a message with the friendly IT people here, so they might be able to download some stuff for me onto CD. Hopefully that way, I'll be able to at least sort out the spyware problem and then attack the virus.

The annoying thing about all this is that Norton is always automatically updating itself, I did it only a few days b4 it all went tits up, tried again yesterday and it said I was fully up to date.

Yet neither the firewall nor Norton stopped the virus getting in in the first place; Norton was initially unable to delete the virus; it did finally manage to fix them; only for exactly the same viruses to reappear a few minutes later.

All very complicated.

 

[DTES]

Still no answer to the question though - is it possible to hide a virus or spyware in the pictures themselves, and hence f*** up your PC by just looking at the thread, or would we have to be a er... "researcher" like els to get infected?

 

[eastlondonseagull]

Still no answer to the question though - is it possible to hide a virus or spyware in the pictures themselves, and hence f*** up your PC by just looking at the thread, or would we have to be a er... "researcher" like els to get infected?

Good call DTES. Anyone got an answer?

 

[DTES]

Maybe this is what the old moral is about. It doesn't send you 'blind' literally, but stops you seeing the rest of the internet...