I worked on the most infected system I have ever seen yesterday. The user called and stated that the pc had the following problem: Only while connected to the internet, between 5 and 15 minutes later, a window would pop up similar to sasser, but not quite and would say the system will reboot in 30 seconds. Which it did.
This system is 2 years old and running xp home. During this time, it has never had virus protection, no windows updates were installed and the HDD had never been defragged.
I ran ad-aware SE. spybot S&D, spyware blaster and AVG 7.0 free version. There was lots of spyware, but the astouding thing was, on its first pass, AVG picked out a who's who list of viruses, trojans and worms. There was 1246 infected files!
Greg
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When I turned on the system, it took so long to boot up, that I could have gone home for a coffee and quick shave, and returned in time for the desktop to appear.
Did you fight the attacks and clean it up? Or did you say - too bad, we're starting from scratch.
Was there data to backup? This is one of those cases where I would have quoted them so much, they would have said "wipe it out". Sure it would have been fun, but time is money.
I run into this sort of thing more than any other problem. Before working on the system, I told the client that a fresh OS installation might be the only permanent solution. She opted for the cheaper quick bandaid approach. Gotta love those farmers; but then, Albertas farmers are hurting units nowadays and don't have any extra bucks to spend.
As for saving data, it was and still is readily accessible.
I've run across a computer at a client site that had about 3600 discrete security issues. About two hundred were tracking cookies. The rest was virus infected files, worms, trojans, spyware and adware, browser helper object exploits, and so on. The same office had another system that was running something in the range of 2400 such problems.
This sort of thing is where I make most of my money, though the numbers I saw on that day were truly humbling. Before that, I'd never seen a system top out at over four hundred. 3600 just blew my mind.
This office was in an industry that labors under legislated security and privacy protection standards, too.
I have cleaned many computers with spybot, AVG, and ad-aware. Most times that I use these products, the computer is still slow, erratic and useless. I most always have to save the data and do a clean install of the operating system. What is your experience?
Had one a couple of weeks ago that had 693 virii loaded on it (to include several varities of Netski, Sasser, Bagle and Mydoom) but the real kicker was the 12,245 spyware/adware/malware files it had. The word run had nothing to do with this system. Took almost 2 days to get it cleaned (couldn't **** it away as had "important data" on it)
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A new record !
This system is 2 years old and running xp home. During this time, it has never had virus protection, no windows updates were installed and the HDD had never been defragged.
I ran ad-aware SE. spybot S&D, spyware blaster and AVG 7.0 free version. There was lots of spyware, but the astouding thing was, on its first pass, AVG picked out a who's who list of viruses, trojans and worms. There was 1246 infected files!
Greg