23 replies to this topic

[jamadan]

Stern2008, on Feb 6 2009, 04:58 PM, said:

look!
h**p://antimalware-pro-scan.com/promo/1/freescan.php?nu=77014206

Is that a response to my post? I don't click on links I know nothing about on sites I don't trust. Could you please summarize the point you'd like to make? Thanks.

[Raid]

jamadan, on Feb 6 2009, 10:43 AM, said:

Unfortunately, a friend I'm helping accidentally downloaded the exact same thing. Having read that Malwarebytes works for AntiVirus 360, I booted it to safe mode and ran it off a USB stick. It found 97 infections and removed all but those that have to be deleted on restart, so I allowed it to restart . . . but that's where the adventure takes a turn for the worse, because it won't start into Windows now in any mode. It gets to the boot menu, but when I select any of the choices (normal, safe, safe with networking, etc), it will kick off as normal with the black Windows logo screen and spinning sign as it reads the hard drive, then it flashes something in a nano second in blue and then suddenly goes back into restart mode and winds up at the boot menu. If I leave it running, it just runs that cycle endlessly never actually allowing me into the operating system. I had to leave it for now to come to work, but I'm concerned removing the viruses hosed up Windows for good. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Jamadan

Hi Jam. It would be very helpful to have a copy of the logfile created by MBAM.

[jamadan]

Hi Dustin,

Sorry, I don't have it anymore. I got it licked with MBAM's help, but it really was a tough one. I first ran MBAM in safe mode and it found 97 infections that it removed, but I had to repair the XP install just to boot to windows (an hour's processing time). Back up and running and decided to try again and the second run of MBAM found only 27 infections, but once again, it hammered XP and I had to repair it. Another hour later and, being a glutton for punishment, I ran MBAM one more time and it found only 2 infections, but this time I didn't have to repair XP, and it got it all, a fourth run was clean. I ran two more anti-virus scans from other products and they also were clean. After getting it up and running, and then spending about 8 hours updating XP to the latest patches (my XP CD is six years old :-), I noticed that the laptop only had SP2 on it before all this happened. Makes me wonder if that might not have contributed to the vulnerability of her windows to being corrupted by this whereas if she'd had SP3 with latest patches, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad.

Thanks again.

Jamadan

[Raid]

Ouch. Sounds like your machine was badly infected. I suspect the reason you had to do a repair installation of windows was because one or more system files were patched, and mbam removed them; as they were no longer safe. Unfortunatly, these files have to be replaced with known good copies, which is what a system repair install accomplishes. Sorry for the inconvenience, and I hope you don't ever run into such a serious situation again.