Posted on 05/29/2011 5:09:43 AM PDT by Daisyjane69
I'm typing fast. My computer is restarting itself every 20 minutes or so.
While finishing my news site browsing before bed, I got a pop up claiming Adobe. I tried to ignore it. Since I had an Adobe file open, I finally relented and agreed to install. BIG MISTAKE. It was a Trojan virus and is in the process of destroying my computer.
Trojan.Win32.Generic.paklacobra
I heard that Macs are better as far as viruses. Is there a reputable dealer that sells Macs? I don't imagine I can afford a brand new Mac.
Failing that, would there be another browser other than IE that would be less hospitable to viruses? This tower is only two years old. And I'm getting messages telling me:
Damaged hard drive clusters RAM usage is critically high RAM memory failure Hard drive failure
This virus is attempting to wipe out my AdAware & AVG as we speak.
I store NOTHING of value on this computer. No photos, movies, passwords, account numbers. I do NO online banking.
I was able, after several tries, to finagle one measly operational window, and it's what I'm using to post this to the people who know everything important...FReepers.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm a plant chick, not a computer chick! LOL
Also, please forgive me if you post a suggestion and I don't reply right away. I have no idea if this window is going to work 5 minutes from now, let alone 5 hours from now. If TSHTF on this thing I won't be able to check replies until Tuesday at the library (as we are in a holiday weekend). Naturally....
I should have been in bed 4 hours ago, and I've been playing around with this box of wires ever since, and I'm exhausted.
This was scary as hell. I never saw anything gobble up things as fast as this miscreant. I knew something was dreadfully wrong within 10 minutes.
Thanks for any help & ideas you have.
Download a copy of this to do your surfing with it runs in ram so when you shut your computer down everything is gone, it will also run on a computer without a hard drive. All documentation is on the homepage. I run Linux exclusively but I still use this little distro to do a lot of surfing with!
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy
You might also want to try this one of the most useful tools ever made. Look for this on the dowload page it will burn a copy to disc for you: Trinity Rescue Kit 3.4 (executable, self burning from Windows only format):
Good luck with getting your computer sorted out and with conquering the “Obama economy”.
I try to keep my home computer security simple: a good virus protection program and an automatic backup to an external hd.
I didn't lose anything. I'm running Windows XP but it probably doesn't matter which version of Windows you have.
Get to Documents and Settings and you should see your old user accounts along with your current user accounts. Your old data files and pictures should be in the old user accounts.
You can click on My Computer, C: and Documents and Settings.
You know I used to think that also but I have had to flash a bunch of BIOS the last few years and people have told me just before the computer would no longer boot they had a virus warning.
I have done searches and read up on it and it seems iffy it could happen from a virus.
Go into Safari/Window/downloads and make sure it didn’t download automatically, even if you thought you stopped it. Delete that and then delete the trash.
Mark
Mostly they do it to steal data which they can sell.
I have MS Security Essentials on my desktop, in addition to the usual stuff that I use. The only issue I've ever had with it is that it "sees" a potential win32 trojan in a temporary file that Avast! antivirus produces during a virus scan. Once I set it up to ignore that particular folder, it no longer flags that file (which appears and disappears several times during the scan, but is ultimately deleted by Avast). Apparently, the heuristics in MS security essentials sees the "signature" of a trojan in that particular file.
Why not just steal the data and leave the computers alone? What is to be gained by destroying the computers of unknown faceless users?
Actually, you shouldn't be running two AV programs at the same time. You should unistall Avast and just run the MS
If all you want to do is turn on the computer and use it, get a Mac.
A ran PCs for about 20 yrs. Finally got tired of having to fix, maintain, finagle mine and wife’s computer.
Bought a Mac laptop in 2007. WOW
Liked simply turning it on and using without all the other stuff. I bought a Mac desktop in 2009 and one for my wife in 2010.
Never a Blue Screen of Death, practically no maintenance, no anti-virus(yet).
About as troublefree as you can get.
And they come with all the software you need. Very little that you have to fetch to do everything you want to do.
The photo program,iPhoto, is IMO the best for the average user.
Macs have won me over.
At the time I finally decided to do a system recovery, there was no "My Computer" to click on. Not even a "Start" button to click. The only thing on the screen was the mouse pointer, and the "Recycle Bin" icon. That's it.
After the recovery. I'm saying that you don't lose the data (documents, pictures, etc.).
I've done system recovery more than once. Because I set up multiple user accounts in the past, I now have nine user accounts in Documents and Settings. Each user account has its original data files.
And I didn’t find any old user accounts either. Had to recreate them again.
I'm surprised. And I still think it's probably there somewhere. Doing a search for all or part of the title of some old documents should reveal any hiding places.
DO NOT use Internet Explorer, it is a virus magnet. Try Firefox instead. It’s a better browser and conforms to to the HTML standard better than IE. Ever since I switched, I don’t get viruses anymore.
Actually, I'm more inclined to keep Avast and uninstall MS. I've been using Avast for several years. MS inadvertently installed security essentials when I installed Win 7 a couple of weeks ago, or during the initial update process. Seems to work OK, but I prefer my tried-and-true approach.
What bothers me is that many of these programs have an "always running" component that interferes swith other similar programs. For example, I used to run Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware, and MS Defender, but I s-canned Ad-Aware and only ran defender for the occasional scan, keeping Spybot's program as the primary TSR for spyware and Avast as the primary AV program. There were some occasional compatibility issues when competing programs were seeking to serve the same purpose at the same time.
I had the same trojan, and it would not allow me to do a restore to any restore point. This was a particularly nasty trojan. >>>>>>>>>>
I have had that happen...... I have not done this but can’t one take an infected hard drive out of a computer...Install it in a clean computer as a slave and then nuke all nasties that way
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