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Computer cleaning

Rear Admiral ChocoRear Admiral Choco I wanna be an owl, Jerry!Owl York CityRegistered User regular
edited November 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
So my girlfriend's WoW account has been hacked several times, and after downloading avast!, CounterSpy, and other trials of services recommended by Blizzard themselves, the assholes have still managed to get in. I'm thinking something is stuck in the registry, but I'm pretty inexperienced with malware and fixes.

Would HijackThis be a good option, or would it be best to just reformat? Are there any other solutions? I'm thinking of looking into an authenticator for later, but for now I'd like to know what I can do to get rid of the shit on there.

Rear Admiral Choco on

Posts

  • Mmmm... Cocks...Mmmm... Cocks... Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    Reformatting really is the only way to be sure I suppose.
    After an onslaught of programs like that with no results it's what I would do.

    I always have used Spybot and Adaware if you want to try them out.

    Mmmm... Cocks... on
  • supabeastsupabeast Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    Reformatting is definitely the way to go, after that install Firefox and Adblock (to block malware that comes through ads). And make sure that she’s using randomly generated passwords and not anything guessable.

    supabeast on
  • Inquisitor77Inquisitor77 2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club Champion A fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
    edited November 2008
    Have you done the usual run of disabling System Restore, doing scans in Safe Mode, etc. etc. etc.?

    You can throw all the programs you want at it but if you haven't done those first two steps you might as well not bother.

    Inquisitor77 on
  • Rear Admiral ChocoRear Admiral Choco I wanna be an owl, Jerry! Owl York CityRegistered User regular
    edited November 2008
    I hadn't considered that, thanks.

    I'll be sure to relay the message to her when she wakes up.

    Rear Admiral Choco on
  • DeMoNDeMoN twitch.tv/toxic_cizzle Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    Inquisitor77 wrote: »
    Have you done the usual run of disabling System Restore, doing scans in Safe Mode, etc. etc. etc.?

    You can throw all the programs you want at it but if you haven't done those first two steps you might as well not bother.

    Wait, how do you disable system restore? Kind of having a similar problem myself.

    DeMoN on
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  • Inquisitor77Inquisitor77 2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club Champion A fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
    edited November 2008
    Control Panel\System\System Restore tab

    Inquisitor77 on
  • W2W2 Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    Could be that you need to change the password to whatever email account you have World of Warcraft tied to.

    If the WoW password was obtained via a keylogger then it stands to reason that they also might have access to any password recovery/password reset emails.

    W2 on
  • ThanatosThanatos Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    I also recommend reformatting.

    Thanatos on
  • ScrubletScrublet Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    You can try all these other things and then watch and hope they worked, or give yourself peace of mind, reformat, change passwords. I recommend the latter.

    Scrublet on
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  • MagicPrimeMagicPrime FiresideWizard Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    Reformat, and give her a stern talking to about dangerous web sites, third party software, and downloading music.

    As a side note - when you reformat and she re-installs WoW.

    If you can, network your computers and temporarily share your WoW Folder. You can drag/drop all the updates into her WoW folder and not have to download them again.

    MagicPrime on
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  • archonwarparchonwarp Registered User regular
    edited November 2008
    MagicPrime wrote: »
    Reformat, and give her a stern talking to about dangerous web sites, third party software, and downloading music.

    As a side note - when you reformat and she re-installs WoW.

    If you can, network your computers and temporarily share your WoW Folder. You can drag/drop all the updates into her WoW folder and not have to download them again.

    The only problem with this is that you may have to manually patch certain updates in (the downloader may not pick them up). This happened to me before, but it could have been a fluke.

    archonwarp on
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  • Rear Admiral ChocoRear Admiral Choco I wanna be an owl, Jerry! Owl York CityRegistered User regular
    edited November 2008
    So my girlfriend called her mom to ask her if she could get a hold of a disk for her, since she never got one with the computers she got from the place. She brought home an XP installation disk and everything seems fine, but any messages relating to it were French. I didn't think much of it and installed it, working off of my minimal Grade 9 knowledge of the language. No problems, other than everything is in French. I tried to go into the Control Panel to change it to English, but it doesn't seem to have changed anything in any meaningful way beyond spell-check and the keyboard functionality.

    Anyone know how I could get this to work in English?

    I've also been trying to connect it to the Internet, but I can't wade through this French much beyond installing XP. I'm on the desktop right now.

    Rear Admiral Choco on
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