ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Bad Virus

Hello,

I have been missing in action for over a month or so. I picked up a bad virus from, Who Knows Where"? However I will be glad to let you know what I did wrong so that you don't make the same mistake.
I got somewhere on the Internet where a lot of "Pop-Ups" kept appearing on my screen. I tried to shut them down as fast as I could, and that is what got me in trouble.
One of the "Pop-Ups" was a small window that promised me a "Better way to surf the net". The problem was ( and I didn't figure it out until a couple of days and many hours on the computer) was that there was a small box in the center of the screen that read, " CLOSE THIS BOX". When I clicked on it it read, "Exit, and Continue!"
What that did was to install a program that allowed a millon "pop-ups" to appear on my machine any time I connected to the Internet. If I had took the time to read all of the small print, ( and I was trying to close 10-20 pop ups at a time)it said I have to move the curser to the small icon at the top of the page and right click on it. That would have said, "Close and exit!". Since I didn't read everything first,I had to remove all of my info from the hard drive and save it back on to disc, while I was off line. I tried to remove the virus, but I failed. I had to reformat my hard drive and install evrything again from scratch.
My haste to remove the pop up and not reading all of the fine print cost a lot of time and effort to get back on line. I just hope that my warning can save one person from this bad virus.

Welcome back, Harold

Welcome back Harold.
In my opinion, forget Internet Explorer and get Firefox as your Web-browser.
Firefox has it's own Pop-up blocker, as well as a few things that IE doesn't have either.
One of them not being "script-kiddies" that want to crash the thing and take your computer over.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 08-04-2005).]

Any brower is better than MSIE...and there are lots of them..Opera, Mozilla(Firefox), Netscape, etc.

Check c|net's sister site www.download.com (or use cnet.com to arrive at download.com). Do a search for "browser" (although they have a pretty good layout to find it yourself).

There's a very hard to detect virus out there right now that effects the registries of hard drives. Slows or stops function of effected drives. Took days to get rid of.

All I can say is that I am a computer novice- yet I've (so far) been able to avoid the major problems that have happened to others.

My "computer guru" has been Kim Komando, who hosts a syndicated radio computer-talk show. Her site has links to all sorts of freeware, including browsers, firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-spy ware. I reccomend it highly.

www.komando.com

When i get these types of viruses i use the IE search option and find USER.DATA.delete it and reboot.When the puter starts back up it sees the user data file is missing and rebuilds the registry to its last saved point and the virus is gone.This has worked for me so far.Also you can go to Micro trend Housecall for an on line scan to double check.next time try it as a last resort.I found this on my own
cheers

I'll post it with kim an see what she say about my last post thanks renosteinke

Old saying from the 80's. Shoulda got a Mac

Harold:
Welcome back, I was just going to e-mail Joe to see if he knew where you went.

I had a similar problem.....

John