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Help! Being inundated with viruses

  • 04-11-2010 4:47pm
    #1
    _Whimsical_
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,971 ✭✭✭


    In the last 12 hours Microsoft Security Essentials has found 23 viruses on my laptop. It's given me several popup windows telling me I have different viruses and offering me the "clean computer" button. I've done this but give it half an hour and there are more popups. They're definitely coming from MSE because they're all logged in its history and they're all classified as "severe".
    I'm now running Malwarebytes which has found 8 viruses but isn't finished its scan yet.
    I also ran SuperAnti Spywear which found nothing today as did Kaspersky rootkit removal tool.

    I ran both MSE and Malwarebytes three days ago and they found nothing.

    When I launched my laptop this afternoon an application window was open called vsbntlo with these details in the path section :
    S-1-5-21-0243936033-3052116371-381863308-1811
    It also says its size is zero bytes.

    I tried searching for vsbntlo in processes and in the startup menu but I'm finding nothing like it. Eventually I used rkill to close it but rkill didn't log it as having closed it.


    Why would I suddenly be attracting so many viruses ? What can I do ?:(
    I'm pretty sure that if MSE is finding this many there must be several getting through that it does not pick up.


Comments

  • #2
    Verres
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 223 ✭✭Verres


    One virus will often contact a server and download other malaware onto your machine - basically, once you've got one piece of malware, others usually follow hot on its heels.

    In these cases I always suggest just taking your personal data off the machine, nuking it with DBAN and rebuilding it from scratch. It's a pain in the ass, but there are two good reasons to do it:
    i) In the long run it's probably quicker to do it this way
    ii) more importantly, once your machine has ever been infected with a virus you can NEVER EVER be 100% sure that there isn't something lurking there waiting to steal your data. If you never (and I mean NEVER) use that machine for anything other than surfing the net or gaming - you don't use email, online banking, online shopping etc. etc. - all you do it surf free to read websites, then it probably doesn't matter as if there is something left on the machine after you "clean" it there'll be nothing worth stealing anyway.
    However, if you ever want to use your machine for anything personal (email, amazon, ebay, ticketmaster, online banking etc. etc.) you would be MUCH better off nuking and rebuilding it.


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