(no subject)
I noticed my computer acting slow today. Then it started to open up random IE windows to fake anti-virus pages. I concluded I had a virus somewhwere, so I booted into safe mode and did a FULL system scan. 2 hours and 1 million individual files later, no luck. Maybe it's malware not picked up by my virus scanner? I restarted, opened up the firewall settings, and blocked iexplore.exe from accessing the internet seeing as how in my task manager, it magically started on its own. This was a mistake seeing as how it caused whatever the hell was wrong with my computer to get pissed and started opening multiple instances of Internet Explorer, each with an endless train of tabs opening. I was able to end each process, and all was quiet at the moment. Except now I get Firefox windows opening once in a while for a fake anti-virus page. I quickly close the fake windows and go to lavasoft and download adaware, because I've used it before and it rocked. Installed, updated, and ran. It found a possible browser hijack, but couldn't give me a name or location. Fine. I have it delete the offending file and restart my computer. Still running slow as hell and the processes tab on taskmanager is flashing each time it updates. For the hell of it, I run msconfig to see what's loading on startup. I see a few random names I've never seen before. Lovely. I opened up firefox again, did a search for malware removal tools, and malwarebytes.org came up. During my search, IE decided to start up again with the endless stream of blank tabs. I guess I really pissed it off not letting it access the internet. I downloaded malewarebytes anti-malware program, updated it, and run a quick scan. It found 30 infected files. After the scan, it conveniently lists the files and what they're infected with. Turns out I had the Vundo trojan. I've seen it's extremely hard to get rid of fully, but so far it seems like it's gone. I'm running another FULL system scan, this time with the malware removal program. I have no idea how I got this sucker, but it hasn't been fun.