One of my friends had that exact same malware! It was absolutely insane, it completely hijacked browsers blocking me from getting any software I would need to clean it, including new browsers that I had to fight against it to download that day. I went the same route as you and just ended up reinstalling Windows as that thing seemed to be everywhere and I figured even if I spent a ton of time working on getting rid of it, there would be something residing somewhere ready to full blown infect the computer again. I hope the creators get the worst case of gonorrhea imaginable, five times over.

Well I was a PC user for about 15 years, and it was very noticeable even without a virus scan to know that your computer was infested (popups, system lethargy, cryptic messages). If I went two years without a virus scan/adaware on a PC it'd be an absolute nightmare.

Oh it's certainly possible. I was simply comparing my level of use.

http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ies/laugh1.gif

Pretty soon they'll be overclocking, and beating your scores http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...es/tongue1.gif

Yeah I've had to clean 4 different PC's recently with various versions of this crap, be it Internet Security 2010, Cyber Security or whatever the hell you want to call it.

3 were cleaned with Spyware Doctor and some reg tweaks and 1 was a complete rebuild because it was already too far gone.

But yes, a royal pain in the ass.

I'm sorry, but you two still have a lot to learn about malware infections.

Acupuncture. A lot of modern malware hides itself deep in the system now. They don't want the user to know they are there. Malware such as those used for botnets have gotten very good at hiding themselves. If a user is able to find and remove such malware, that's one less machine the creator of the malware has to use for his purposes.

ie. just because you don't "see" signs of malware on your system, doesn't mean you are clean.

I don't normally run AV software constantly on my systems, but I will do an AV scan every so often. A recent scan I did on an external drive found a few MP3's that had malicious scripts imbedded in them. I hadn't touched those mp3's for years and I had no idea they were infected.

And for you IndianScout. All the care in the world still doesn't prevent you from getting malware. Malware can come from damn near anything, from simply pluggin in a usb thumb drive, (which is why it is encouraged to disable Autorun) to simply visiting a website that has been infected with malware that injects a malicious java script into the page.

My point is. No matter how careful you are or what level of IT experience you have, you should do an AV scan every so often and actually look at your system to make sure it's not infected instead of assuming you are not infected.

Q F T

Malware is some nasty stuff. It doesn't matter how careful you are, because the worst malware exploits bugs in software.

Yeah I discovered a little ******* like that embedded in a mini digital photo frame once.

Do you know what kind of a person doesn't run an AV 24/7? A terrorist, that's what. You sir are a terrorist!

I wouldn't feel comfortable without my 24/7 AV. It's blocked enough exploits that I think it's earned its keep.

I am now dealing with this on a friends machine and she is panicking because she needs it for school right now!

While struggling with this it occurs to me that since this stuff actually has the nerve to expect credit card payment, there must be ways to track it back to its creators fairly easily and arrest them. This thing behaves as a particularly nasty virus in every respect, so why are the creators not behind bars?

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Think of it as organized crime with offshore accounts and money laundering schemes. Which is actually not far from the truth.

Even if they were to track those payments to the person responcible, that person may be outside the jurisdiction of the country attempting to make the arrest.

Most likely they live in a foreign country where nobody really cares. Probably Nigeria or something. Maybe some day they'll get the Russian treatment.

Went around a friends last night which had Internet Security 2010, task manager disabled, change or set another wallpaper disabled, internet browsers hijacked and pretty much all internet access disabled and everytime you try to do anything it tells you to activate your internet security[cursing]
Safe mode wouldnt work either so im just gonna format the bloody thing, its a kids computer and ive never seen so many toolbars installed.

Ahh yeah, my mom just LOVES those useless toolbars. That's where half the crap malware comes from half the time I think. My little brother infected my parents computer by looking at porn several times. After the 2nd time he was just outright banned from their computer. Apparently though they just found out that he somehow figured out their password and was on it late one night.

Just came back from a call. Guess what the problem was ?

Anyway, broke my own record....removed it in exactly 4 minutes.

http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...es/tongue1.gif

Pfft. I eat Internet Security 2010 for breakfast. Cleaned about 5 of them in the last week. Its actually a pretty easy one. For some odd reason it lets me install unlocker. Which lets me delete the dll's the are embedded in everything. (causes a BSOD but it works) Once those are gone a scan with malwarebytes is all it takes. Becarefull because AV/Malwarebytes will try to delete winlogon.exe which will cause the login logout loops. In which case you'll need to get a good one ans swap it out with the recovery console or in a different computer.

...you east pieces of s**t for breakfast?

Are there any programs which are effective against stopping getting infected with this crap?

Sort of. "No-script" is the only piece of software (firefox add-on, not a standalone program) that I have found that can effectively block all malware which is web based.

As for a standalone program like you AV suite. No. They are constantly coming out with new variants of those "rogues" which are meant to slip through AV programs. No AV or other malware blocking program can be 100% effective simply because you can not predict what will be out there.

This is why I always laugh when I see people post about advice on different AV suites because one virus slipped past their current AV suite.