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

As stupid as AOL is supposed to be, it does do a pretty good job of keeping viruses away. You can certainly click the wrong stuff but it is too dumb to actually launch much itself. I conscienciously avoid "jokes" that make me load something.

Thank You All,

I think it was just my stupidity that got me in trouble. I clicked on every thing too fast which got me in trouble. I love this board and I missed being here. I know that I get busy now and then and I don't get to sign in. But not being able to get here at all was driving me crazy! I just wanted to see how every one was doing. Now that I am back, I will do my best to stop by again at least 2-3 times a week. It's nice to know that my old friends missed me. I have know Greg and Joe T. for Years, John and I both work in NJ and I have met so many other great friends here that I wouldn't want to leave here. Nice to be back!

My folks pc recently had a virus that opened about 70-80 windows to the same web page.

Eventually I removed their hard drive and put it in my own pc as an F drive and removed the virus using my own antivirus software.

I detected 78 viruses and 200 adware programs on thier drive.

A knowledgeable friend reckoned that the virus was designed to increase hits on a particular site and was self replicating as long as it was on c drive.

I forgot to mention another thing you can do to defend yourself.....install a "hosts" file on you computer.

A "hosts file" is a list of legitimate web addresses. If an address is not on the list, it will keep your computer from automatically linking to it.
These lists are maintained, and screened for bad addresses. They help keep your computer from being "hijacked."
See Kim for some of these also.

Kim Commando- a real life saver for the computer. I am subsrcibed to her weekly email letter. Some good info there, I recommend it.

Frank,
how did you find "user.data."??
on the C drive?
I would like to try this for my coworker's desktop. (he just got a virus that keeps loading porn into his "favorites" on his work computer.) not cool.
what version of windows are you on?

(edited to add last sentence)

[This message has been edited by goodwill (edited 08-10-2005).]

A real good way of removing 'browser hijackers'(which hijack your start page and/or search pages) is with 'hijack this', available from this page.

Hope this helps someone else avoid these problems, and welcome back Harold

"Any brower is better than MSIE...and there are lots of them..Opera, Mozilla(Firefox), Netscape, etc."
Don't forget Safari and Camino on Macintosh.

"Old saying from the 80's. Shoulda got a Mac"
Hehehehehehehe... I'll behave and not start the battle of the Platforms.

Did you get that Win2K-aimed virus that was born last week?

Ian A.

Nope, not me. 800MHz Imac G4 , 0s 10.3.8

I hope my mother's aincient Win98 PC didn't get a variant of it, or my weekend will be booked! She refuses to have me put antiviruys software on it, claims that it makes it "too slow."

1.25GHz iBook G4 12", Mac OS 10.4.2

Ian A.

Hey what's ancient about W98?
If it does everything you need why not?
I still have 3 pure PCDOS 6.3 machines that boot in seconds and never crash.
I doubt anyone is writing DOS viruses.

I've got a Mac and I haven't used IE in about 3 years. I use Safari for all of my internet adventures. I was never a computer geek but damn if this Macintosh iMac computer isn't one the best products I have ever bought. So simple to use, and easy to operate. Plus I never get any of those virus's that you always hear about on the news. Mac is the way to go, IMO.

Thanks for all the good wishes. However, Guess what I got again. YUP! I picked up that DA** virus again. Once you get it, it hides in the "C" drive. You can go into the C drive under "Safe Start" and remove it. However even if you do, there are other files hidden out there somewhere, that re-installs the virus again. You can actually watch the virus change names and come back over and over again. The way to get rid of this virus, (I think) is to go out (under safe mode) and find all of the hidden files that there is. (I run Adware and Spybot) Which will remove about 85-90% of the hidden files, then you have to go into each file, find the bogus files, delete it. After all that is done, you can remove the bad program. (I hope) I will let you know how I make out.

Been there done that (including booting in safe mode and removing). The thing was so persistant that I finally had to give up and reimage the computer. It was only a couple of minutes ago that I finally reinstalled the last of my programs and data.

I wish you the best and I wish those writers of these things several years in prison.

Shane

My advice would be to stay off porn sites.

You know, you would think that it was the porn sites that would have the virus, however sad to say, it was a music website.
I was checking on some lyrics to one of my favorite songs, and that was when I got hit with, 10-15 pop-ups, and several viruses. Luckily, the computer security caught 90% of the problem. It was that last one that got through that got me.

I have had my virus scanner go off on a shopping site that I got on a google search when I was looking for pool lights.

If it was only porn sites I would suspect Jerry Falwell was writing them.