On 29/01/2014 11:00, Tim Lamb wrote:
In message , Martin Brown
writes
On 29/01/2014 09:16, Tim Lamb wrote:
In a momentary fit of insanity I allowed an offering of Explorer 8.0 (I
think) to download.
The only visible consequence is an overnight firing up of Explorer such
that I am greeted each morning with a Windows related advert.
Curiously the screen is prevented from entering sleep mode.
Today's offering was for a Windows driver scanner for a Brother printer.
I am using XP with service pack 3. I know this system is about to be
unsupported so am becoming very nervous about anything uninvited!
Any thoughts?
Do you have another computer that you can use to make a bootable CD to
scan this machine for any known malware? Corrupting IE to make it show
adverts or hijack keystrokes is unfortunately all too common.
Only my wife's laptop (running Vista) This sounds to be beyond my
current skill set:-(
If it has a combo rw CD drive it shouldn't be. ISTR all the major AV
players have some sort of daily disk image that you can download and run
(and provide instructions for how to do it). You obviously have to tell
the PC to boot from CD first instead of HD but many are already set like
that by default. It shouldn't be too hard to do this. No harder than
downloading the right file from your AV vendor and following a few
simple instructions. It has the advantage that you are then using
software that is familiar to you. Leaving it three days after the
malware got past a decent AV product is usually enough time for their
countermeasures to have caught up enough to zap it.
You can't trust the main machine any more. There are some tools that
use enough obfuscation that they might be able to detox an infected
machine without being noticed by the malware. I have found
MalwareBytes to work fairly well on other peoples infected PCs YMMV
http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebyte...-10804572.html
OK Noted. Thanks
As Fred said download it from their main site Cnet will try and flog you
stuff and add its own relatively benign adware if you are careless.
Increasingly lots of updaters have default settings to install annoying
destablising plugins adware "tools" for browsers - Adobe for instance.
--
Regards,
Martin Brown