My laptop appears to be Trojan'd by something called "Virtumonde." The last time I used the laptop was Friday. When I booted it up yesterday after we got home I noticed it was running slowly. At one point my icons all disappeared, and Windows kept saying I didn't have Updater running. Well, I do, I just don't have it on automatic updates. I have it tell me what updates are available and then I install them. When I checked automatic update, it was indeed on.

Anyway, when I surf on Firefox I get other websites just pop up. I know they are about to open because suddenly something is asking me about setting a cookie; I always do this to say no to sites I don't want to set a cookie. Then a web page pops up. It can be anything from sports to porn sites to search sites.

I have a couple of things I do do in IE because it just works better on those sites and that's when the problem really starts (my research shows me that part of this Trojan hangs out in IE files). It says I have a virus and I should download something called "Antivirus 2009." Of course I don't do it because I know nothing about this program. It probably plants more spyware on your computer (according to research, that's what it does). But you can't even stop it. Even if you hit cancel you get popups. And you can tell they're not legitimate because they're full of typos. One even says "You need to install this if you want your PC to remain unsoiled." "Unsoiled"? ::snort::

When it first started last night, James said, "Run AdAware." I did, and it pinpointed the Trojan. But when you tell it to remove, it doesn't. I even uninstalled and reinstalled AdAware to make sure I had the latest version. I ran AVG on it; the first time it didn't even see anything. The second time it found something, which it said it removed. Still the same problems.

A friend says he uses Avast and that has a squelch for this "Virtumonde," but I downloaded it and it scanned the entire machine before it started up and didn't even indicate anything. I set it to scan again and it's scanning stuff like peer-to-peer applications, or stuff like IM and MSN Messenger and all this other communications stuff, none of which I have on the laptop. I don't even have an e-mail client on it; I check mail on the desktop or via a website if I'm on the laptop. I'm pretty sure I got this Trojan via a group I read on Yahoo, not from downloading anything in e-mail.

I'm quite flummoxed.

Labels: computers

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:31:00 PM

Comments:

Sent you an e-mail - hope it helps!

J.

# posted by  Anonymous : 9:40:00 AM

 

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