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I managed to catch a nasty infection on my PC last week, I guess it was some kind of Trojan. I beleive I caught it whilst downloading an Mp3 on a P2P network (overnet).
I was running an upto date version of McAfee AV and Firewall. Windows was set to auto update but the infection still got through. It maybe because I also had AVG installed (but inactive) I now gather two AV programs can lessen your protection rather than increase it. All my critical software was legit as well.
The virus / trojan firstly started with Aurora popups which appeard with every webpage visited. This was not easy to remove in itself!! Once that was removed my search engine (google) was redirecting to another site all together. Passages of text were littered with dodgy links. Neither AV software, AdAware or Spybot could remove it. Tried an online scan, that found a couple of things but the problems were still there. Then my homepage kept re-directing and refreshing repeatedly. this meant I could not access internet options or anything else from the browser. I also lost my internet connection, this stopped OE and Firefox from working.
Disturbingly it also disabled McAfee firewall. Any attempt to restart it reset the computer!!!
I could get on-line in safe mode but I could not find a cure so in the end I did a complete re-install. So after much backing up and re-installing I am back. On the plus side the computer is working much faster now.
A big thanks to Matt for his help this morning [smilie=b:
I was running an upto date version of McAfee AV and Firewall. Windows was set to auto update but the infection still got through. It maybe because I also had AVG installed (but inactive) I now gather two AV programs can lessen your protection rather than increase it. All my critical software was legit as well.
The virus / trojan firstly started with Aurora popups which appeard with every webpage visited. This was not easy to remove in itself!! Once that was removed my search engine (google) was redirecting to another site all together. Passages of text were littered with dodgy links. Neither AV software, AdAware or Spybot could remove it. Tried an online scan, that found a couple of things but the problems were still there. Then my homepage kept re-directing and refreshing repeatedly. this meant I could not access internet options or anything else from the browser. I also lost my internet connection, this stopped OE and Firefox from working.
Disturbingly it also disabled McAfee firewall. Any attempt to restart it reset the computer!!!
I could get on-line in safe mode but I could not find a cure so in the end I did a complete re-install. So after much backing up and re-installing I am back. On the plus side the computer is working much faster now.
A big thanks to Matt for his help this morning [smilie=b: