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Virus - PC shuts down
mooshoepork
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I haven't had a virus in years, so I can't even remember how to fix this, so I thought I'd ask here.
Girlfriend's pc got infected (I presume anyway) when she accidentally downloaded a virus from limewire.
I told her to do a scan, but her laptop shuts down before it finishes, probably because of the virus.
What programs should I be using to clean this mofo? Avast and hijack this are ones I've heard thrown around.
Girlfriend's pc got infected (I presume anyway) when she accidentally downloaded a virus from limewire.
I told her to do a scan, but her laptop shuts down before it finishes, probably because of the virus.
What programs should I be using to clean this mofo? Avast and hijack this are ones I've heard thrown around.
mooshoepork on
0
Posts
And tell her to get off Limewire for god's sake.
It should be noted in general you can't have two anti virus programs active on your computer, so uninstall whatever she's using (norton/mcaffee?) and try avast or avg free editions. I've never looked into hijack this but I also have heard it bandied about as a solution to more severe virus problems.
Boot up your computer (possibly in safe mode?) and open task manager and look for any processes that look out of place, try googling the name of the process.
Sometimes your anti-virus software will even identify the name of the virus but fail to remove/quarantine it. In general, if you can identify a nasty bugger there will be a solution for getting rid of it as one of the top google results.
Limewire is not your friend, get rid of it or this will happen again.
Back up whatever she needs before you go plugging away at the computer. (this can be done through another drive, a flash drive, or over the LAN) If you want to backup over LAn and in Safemode with networking, make sure you're not hooked up to the internet or at least behind a hardware firewall.
Now in safemode, you should run autoruns (google). examine the services tab and look at any services that aren't certified by Microsoft/Windows or some other trusted brand name you're familiar with. Make sure they're "verified" though. Delete or disable whatever you don't recognize, I'd recommend disabling so that you can reactivate it if you fuck up. Also look at things that run at startup.
If you wanna be all hardcore about it, you can hit window key + r to pull up a run window, type in 'services.msc' and then use THAT interface to disable weird services.
Once in safemode, you should be able to run hijackthis (google it) and once you get a log file, you can dump it here and we can pick at things that we think are suspicious if you'd like. or if you kind of know what is and isn't good/bad, you can do it yourself.
Now if you've been googling weird files, reading forums and security boards, you might have an idea of what the infection is. Proceed with the proper removal tools or killbox (google it). Killbox will delete pretty much anything. Don't expect to get something back after deleting it with killbox though.
If your issue is serious like a rootkit, you're probably fucked. So just backup and...as much as I don't like to throw around this route... reformat. Although, once a system is compromised, a reformat is a pretty good step anyways just to be sure everything's clean. And whoever had the computer that got fucked should do the reformat just so they learn the painful lesson of being smart on the internet. (I've done many a reformat, so I've learned the lesson over and over..and over, but now I've learned it!)
TL;DR
Backup data
Autoruns for disabling suspect services and things that run automatically
HijackThis for removing suspect registry entries
Killbox for deleting suspect files (not an easy way to reverse this step)
Rootkit detection/Reformat
Other notes:
- Don't use limewire.
- Everyone should backup his or her data in such a way that in the event of a catastrophic hardware failure, you could still access your important data (financial, homework, research, etc.)