I got a worm/virus/trojan for the very first time yesterday...

[moriah]

Rather insidious, seems to have come through a browser flaw unless the Silverlight player for the Democratic Convention was infected (and if so, I think all of you would be complaining now).

I use one of the better antivirus programs but it did not detect it, neither did Spybot or Ad-aware until it was too late.

Knew there was something up when it was redirecting my browsing and had changed my background.

... I use Firefox, too...

*cry*

At least it's gone now.

[DarkTirade]

1. Sounds more like a hijacker than a virus.

[moriah]

4. It definitely had a hijacker as part of what was on the computer, for true...

... but F-Prot has never before failed to detect or remove a rootkit, and there was a rootkit on there that it did not see.

I'm trying to decide if I really want to go through that hell again just to get the files to send to them so they can update their definitions.

[NJmaverick]

2. Here use this

it will help keep your computer safe

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Spyware_Doctor_-_Starter_Edition_d5790.html


one of the best anti malware programs out there.

[moriah]

3. The particular threat is gone right now.

Removed by Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Removal Tool.

However, my virus scanner company, F-Prot, who I contacted today, was disappointed I had already removed the issue because they want to update their tools to fix it.

So they asked me if I would be willing to recreate my browsing history and see if I can get re-infected, save the files, and send the infected files to them before I remove it again.

I've used F-Prot since back in the DOS days, and this is the first time EVER that it failed to catch a trojan, worm, virus, or hijacker. It was truly one of the best, and still is -- although Kaspersky's and AVG are probably as good or better. I started using it back in the day because Norton and McAfee sucked majorly, and it combined with Spybot, Ad-aware, and use of Firefox exclusively along with a hardware firewall has been more than sufficient to protect me before. Since it uses heuristics scanning it USUALLY protects people even from new security threats, although the heuristics has been more likely to disable a good program than miss a bad one (they had to update it so LogMeIn didn't set it off, for examile).

It was some unusual Smitfraud variant, I believe, and since it's a gateway trojan a bunch of other things got on. I've seen posts about the similar symptoms online and neither Norton nor Symantec apparently detect it either (so at least my favored antivirus is not one of the WORST now... heh.)

But that means I'm going to need to scan my work computer too, because it uses Symantec (company policy, that's the only one we're allowed to use, which royally sucks).

Just kind of disappointed in myself. I mean, I've been a computer tech for a long time, I usually lecture people about unsafe browsing habits, I don't surf porn sites or pirate, and I never click on popups. I guess it shows that no one is invulnerable.