[BNM] weird pc virus? malware

[Jason Bailey]

> From: Simon O'Hare <simon.ohare at curveit.com>
> Subject: Re: [BNM] weird pc virus? malware
> To: "'Brighton New Media'" <bnmlist at brightonnewmedia.org>
> Date: Wednesday, 18 March, 2009, 10:09 AM
> Was the machine actually starting up
> from "off"?
> 
> Does it do the same thing if you restart the machine?
> 
> S

I wasn't around in the day to see it first occur but my wife phoned me to say the internet was broken. My PC was apparently very slow at starting-up (i.e. windows start-up). Slow after login and firefox wouldn't start. I suspect this is when the registry was being hacked and whatever was being installed etc was happening.

I managed to login and clear some of it but the audio/adverts were playing continuously and after each reboot. There were no applications running in task manager. I started turning off a few services/processes but I'm guessing it had attached itself to explorer or svchost. I didn't look like a streamed audio file as there was no network activity and I even unplugged the network to check. Adverts/news/onnetworks.com- which I'll look at later)

At that point I decided that if it had somehow got through my router, firewall, anti-virus and spybot that it had probably come in something downloaded and I've reinstalled XP.

Just like to know what it was really. It had definitely hijacked firefox but not so sure about IE as I didn't want to try too much. IE actually looked ok, I could google sites and get to the real ones unlike firefox which was sending me all over the place and I should have noted down where but I was a bit annoyed.

jason