I'm infected

Rabies

I have McAfee Virus Scan, Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware running on my computer. Anytime I go online McAfee kicks in telling me that I have a few trojans, viruses and worms infewcting my pc. I run the virus checker and it finds and kills all of these. If I stay online it will keep on finding these every few minutes and constantly scans my HD. Once I go offline there dosen't seem to be a problem. If I run the virus can again it usually finds nothing. Things only happen when I go online. Most of the things it finds are the same ones it has found times before. Sounds as if it is replicating it self

It also causes a problem with browsing, data sent out is usually 3x the amount received. Browsing goes to a crawl. Connected to ISDN modem. Also CPU usage can often stay at 100% when just browsing with one window open.

Outlook isn't used for emails, only Thunderbird.
Browsers used are Firefox and IE.
Win XP Pro
2.8Ghz
1GB ram

Does anyone know any programs to run to rid my computer of whatever is causing the problem.

I would consider formating the HD but its main use is business and my father would go crazy if I told him I wanted to wipe the HD clean. He freaks out about stuff like that. Everything he needs business related is stored on it.

Any advise or help is welcome

thanks

Mutant_Fruit

Disable "System Restore" if you have that enabled. Virus's and suchlike are known to hide in that, as regual programs cannot access that area of the computer.

After thats done, re-scan the computer and kill em off again (make sure you ctrl-alt-del and close their processes if they are running). If they keep recurring, try a different virus scanner.

What process is taking all the CPU time? Find out what it is, and google it to see what it is, and how to remove it.

Also, does your firewall app (i assume you have one) tell you how much data each program is sending/recieving. Check that to see whats sending the data.

If you have no firewall app, install kerio personal firewall right away (or another one of your choice).

Esel

Your Dad should definitely back up his data (to CD) on a very regular basis.

Never mind virus threats - what about simple Hard Disk failure?

smoke.me.a.kipper

tbh, ive found that if you run spybot / adaware and then restart and run them straight away, if you've spyware in the first place, you can find more, just after re-boot. usually, this gets rid of a few remaining pieces of spyware, that the first scan didnt find.

Rabies

Cheers for the replies.
Going to do all that now Mutant Fruit, thanks.
esel, back ups are made about once or twice a week. He still has a fear of deleting stuff

Titan_soul

I 've used a freebee from Zdnet called STINGER

I use spybot and adaware also ,but stinger does a different scan.

Trojans & variants

Made by mcafee

Anima

If you can, format and reinstall windows, install avg and firewall, go on internet, download avg update and firewall update, then get all windows updates and your away.

FOOL PROOF

I suggest this way because it will save so much hassle depending on how bad your infected and you know you have a clean system so you could always make a ghost of your hdd to go back to. Might seem like alot of work first time but its always worth it when things go wrong. Even better when you've got windows just on a partition or second drive.

jessy

What version of McAfee and Adaware are you running? You need to make sure that they are up to date. If you have 3x more data going out than coming in then stop all internet access now (could be a hacker or Trojan sending user details to himself).

After you update MacAfee and Adaware, reboot in safety mode and the run Adaware and McAfee from there.

Get a firewall. It’s critical that you have one.

Finally if its an old version of McAfee then i would recommend that you don't bother to update it just buy either BitDefender Ver 8 or Panda Platinum both are excellent pieces of software.

Raz

In my appartment we got a hacker who got in before we got the firewall set up. He started using one of the computers as an ftp server, transfering gigs of data and crapping out the bandwidth. He had it running in the background aswell making it a bit more difficult to find.
It's a possibility.

smoke.me.a.kipper

Titan_soul wrote:

I 've used a freebee from Zdnet called STINGER

stinger: http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=stinger&affid=130

Stugots

I had a problem a while back with a friends computer where the virus was choking internet access and preventing the anti-virus software from running. The solution was to wake up the task manager and kill any suspicious processes. It took a while, but after a few reboots, I finally killed the virus task and the anti-v was then able to run ok.

Another suggestion (not for the faint hearted) if you're stuck operating in manual anti-virus mode is to check your registry entries using regedit. In particular its worth saving an image of what is in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->SOFTWARE->Microsoft->Windows->CurrentVersion->Run
A lot of virus executables place themselves here and are then executed at windows startup time. If you know what is supposed to be in that registry folder then you will easily spot any unwelcome additions and can remove them manually. Note that there are usually several valid entries in this folder also, so don't randomly start deleting keys or nasty things could occur :eek:

jessy

Titan_soul wrote:

I 've used a freebee from Zdnet called STINGER

I use spybot and adaware also ,but stinger does a different scan.

Trojans & variants

Made by mcafee

Stringer is made by McAfee so I don’t see why they wouldn’t include all the definitions in there own Antivirus software (which he said he was running).

Titan_soul

I take it you haven't used stinger then

It's got a new search engine ,it's like a prototype of things to come

jessy

it searches faster because it is only searching for a very small number of virus and worms, why would McAfee release there best scan engine as a free app?

jessy

And yes i have used stringer.

Titan_soul

up i give

pickarooney

Rabies - I'm Infected

Well I was amused, but I'm suffering from sleep deprivation.

CyberGhost

Rabies wrote:

I have McAfee Virus Scan, Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware running on my computer. Anytime I go online McAfee kicks in telling me that I have a few trojans, viruses and worms infewcting my pc. I run the virus checker and it finds and kills all of these. If I stay online it will keep on finding these every few minutes and constantly scans my HD. Once I go offline there dosen't seem to be a problem. If I run the virus can again it usually finds nothing. Things only happen when I go online. Most of the things it finds are the same ones it has found times before. Sounds as if it is replicating it self

It also causes a problem with browsing, data sent out is usually 3x the amount received. Browsing goes to a crawl. Connected to ISDN modem. Also CPU usage can often stay at 100% when just browsing with one window open.

Outlook isn't used for emails, only Thunderbird.
Browsers used are Firefox and IE.
Win XP Pro
2.8Ghz
1GB ram

Does anyone know any programs to run to rid my computer of whatever is causing the problem.

I would consider formating the HD but its main use is business and my father would go crazy if I told him I wanted to wipe the HD clean. He freaks out about stuff like that. Everything he needs business related is stored on it.

Any advise or help is welcome

thanks

is it a window on the right bottom that pops up?

it's just a news info! telling you what's the latest threat! it doesn't mean you are infected!

Rabies

CyberGhost wrote:

is it a window on the right bottom that pops up?

it's just a news info! telling you what's the latest threat! it doesn't mean you are infected!

When I run a scan when I'm online it finds whatever it is. Don't think it news info. Maybe it is
smak, got stinger. It found some things, deleted them.