My main PC (not the web server) just became infected with something. I’m a reasonably cautious person, so this might be a wider problem. I had just watched a video about the woman who said Barack Obama was hot (it was from NBC)…. probably a “Flash” exploit if I had to guess.
If I seem a little preoccupied for a bit, that’s why. Fortunately, I have my iPhone, although it can’t do everything the PC can…..
The details that probably don’t care about…
The thing that “got” me is called Antivirus Soft – it’s a Fake Antivirus scanner whose purpose is to get you to turn over your credit card number to the hackers (in order to “fix” your computer)
I rebooted in Safe Made (press F8 while the computer is booting) and then used System Restore to back up a few days and restore the system. It seems to have cleared up the issues, although I’m still looking around for residue damage…
If you don’t have System Restore creating checkpoints automatically, I strongly urge you to turn it on, even though it chews up disk space. It’s saved my butt several times. You’ll find it under Accessories / System Tools / System Restore
(there are other ways to get to it, but that is the most reliable way)
Make sure the Settings say to create restore points, and if you don’t currently have a restore point, manually create one. It won’t do any good to create one -after- you get infected.
Ran into that over the weekend and it’s a real hassle to deal with. It’s doable without having to use the system restore, but it requires a couple of tricks and an app called Process Explorer. Once I got the process stopped, Microsoft Security Essentials seemed to clean up the mess. Haven’t had problems since then.