Just finished the most annoying BS ever having to do with a virus/trojan, but apparently seem to have saved everything thanks to Windows System Restore of all things.
So basically, a few days ago Firefox and/or windows security gets infected by some sort of BS malware thing. It was more annoying than dangerous, but still. Every time I would fire up Firefox or any program related to the Windows Security Center, it'd prompt a fake (it had spelling errors and all) version of the Security Center and start a 'scan' that would 'find' all sorts of viruses and invited you to visit other sites or buy shit. Clearly, this sucked ass. I could circumvent it easily by using another browser and killing the process manually the minute it did start, but that wasn't going to do.
So I resort to the usual routine...I try hijackthis first, which didn't do shit except for mess up my Steam install (but that was my fault for being a little too...crude in my efforts). Then I do the rounds of free virus scans, but almost all of them find absolutely nothing. Ugh. Finally, a sort of downloadable client virus scan by Kaspersky actually finds something and asks me to delete it. I agree. I reboot and...something's wrong.
The malware was gone, surely enough. But my Windows install was corrupted. EVERY shortcut to a program stopped working, as did any automatic program startup. Even going in explorer and manually clicking the .exe files wouldn't work. Everything gave me a 'not assigned to any function, choose program you want to open this with'. The ONLY thing that worked was starting the .exes manually as administrator. And, bizarrely, only the internet explorer shortcut still worked but IE had reverted to a set (couldn't change in any way) super tiny font. The fuck?
At that point I was considering a brand new install or even a Windows 7 upgrade, but I decided to give it one more shot using the Vista install DVD. Windows Repair was useless - apparently the only fucking thing that 'repairs' is boot files. More out of desperation than any real hope, I used System Restore from about a week earlier. And lo and behold, it actually works and everything seems to be back to normal. Steam install was still fucked, but I just reinstalled. The biggest pain will now be downloading my games again, but eh, there are worse things.
Still, a bizarre episode. Kind of annoyed that something as silly as this problem would a) not be found at all by many virus scanners and b) removing it fucked up the install.Statistics: Posted by Rinox — Sun May 01, 2011 2:08 am
]]>