Last night James was doing a search on Google. Oddly, if he clicked on the link to his first result, it went to the correct site. But all subsequent links listed as results on that search went to totally unrelated websites. So he did an AVG scan that turned up nothing. Searches on Google revealed this was some type of virus, but it was bedtime and we didn't have time to look into it.

I spent most of the day (the part of it when I was actually awake) sneezing and coughing and feeling like a slug, so I decided I'd help James out the way he helped me yesterday. When the Trojan invaded my laptop and then tried to get to my desktop, I ran Microsoft's scan on Onecare.live.com and it worked like a charm. So I pulled up IE on James' computer, downloaded what I needed, set a restore point, and ran the scan.

The scan found something called "Obfuscator.ET," and said it found two files in system32 that it could not clean and was certain were viruses. It asked if I wanted to report these two files to Microsoft. I said yes.

Next thing I know, IE came up blank. It said it couldn't find the server. In fact, it couldn't find any server, on any site. Nor could Firefox find any servers. Nor would it download e-mail. It was as if the scan cut off the connection to the internet. Well, that sucks.

I tried running AVG again. Nothing. James came home and I let him know what I had done. He tried various things and nothing helped. Not only Firefox/IE/Eudora was down—now the Windows firewall wasn't working, either! And the restore point I so carefully set didn't work! I even posted a question on a Microsoft discussion group. They directed me to Microsoft live chat. Well, since I got him into this, I could try and get him out. So I talked to the tech and she eventually took remote control of James' computer to look for the problem.

Just as that was about to begin, a thought struck me about when I was setting up the netbook. I checked on the network connections and darned if the scan hadn't completely wiped the DNS values!!! I filled those back in and suddenly Firefox/IE/Eudora all worked again, and the Windows Firewall came back up.

However, Google was still misdirecting links. So the tech worked through remote access. And at the end the Google links finally worked properly. However, we have been escalated to Level 2 service because she still hadn't fixed everything.

And dammit, the Windows Firewall is down again. I had that fixed!

Labels: computers

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:19:00 PM

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