Pooter virus

[Ian@1904]

Sounds identical to what our PC picked up a few months ago. My Norton AV was up to date and I have several Spyware packages on the PC none of whish were any use.

The program hid itself inside Outlook. It is easy to remove if you are a techie, my local techie services fixed it. in about 30mins. No damage done to the PC.

It is worth considering changing your puter protection to Panda

[Helen F H]

Funny you should say that!

Just phoned the shop - its fixed. They have installed "Panda" on it. Does this mean i have to shove bamboo in the A drive?

[Ian@1904]

Originally Posted by Porg

Funny you should say that!

Just phoned the shop - its fixed. They have installed "Panda" on it. Does this mean i have to shove bamboo in the A drive?

No
use the USB ports, for the bamboo

[krafty]

oooooh! A subject of which I am an expert on and behold its already been answered! It sounds as though in the first instance you clicked yes inadvertantly to a license agreement hidden in a bit of free software or on a website. These can be as you know swines to get rid off. What panda will do is put a second firewall on your pc to stop this happening again but win xp has this already for free (with service pack 2) and this filters your incoming web. The down side is some innocent content will also be blocked and it will be a few weeks until panda is running as you will like it. The top tip here is to always say NO to any pop ups and avoid websites that have messages saying that you have to accept to view the content. Trust me it ain't worth seeing! If you need any advice at all PM me - its what I do for a living!! James.

[Sql]

Originally Posted by tsw

Also, its worth checking out Norton anti-virus at the moment as you can get a 15 day free trial of it. Useful for when it goes pop next time, as it does flag up an attempted access to your machine from outside.

Sounds more like a Firewall, that blocks connections to and from the machine. The Norton security suite will include one, but I doubt the stand-alone AV will.

You will of course want a firewall as well. Windows XP SP2 isn't too bad, but Zone Alarm gives more control and information. Plenty of others as well, such as those in the suites.

[louigi]

This happend to me the other week when I down loaded the Yahoo isp. Kept getting Arora pop ups still am how do I get rid of them.

[recurve]

One of the favourite routes to get this stuff on your system is something to do with MSN Messenger, might have been 'Messenger Extras' or some such (some sort of add on I think).

It then sticks all the extra icons on your desktop and resets the home page of your browser, it seems to set up file names with a random string of numbers which change every time the spyware removers try to do their stuff. Spyware eradicators that I tried failed to get rid of it till I 'uninstalled' the culprit, which was do-able from the add-remove software page. Have had no problems since.

Hope this is of some help to someone, found most of the solution by a bit of juditious 'Googling'

[rustuk]

Few pointers here might help?
Norton AV - personally I wouldn't bother with it, yes it does come bundled with XP, but I'd bin it off straight away..
AVG free is as good as anything (and it's free!) try WWW.Grisoft.com
Also, if you're running XP then get the Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta, and forget any other spyware software - this is easily the best I've come across.
Can't remember if it runs on 2000..
If you're on XP, make sure you get SP2 installed on it - Microsoft are suspending support for SP1 in the Autumn (or so I heard) and enable the personal firewall etc.
If you're on 2000/98 etc (heaven forbid) then get something like Zone alarm for firewalling..
But it does sound like spyware, and if it were my machine rather than bugger about trying to clean it off, I'd flatten the machine and start again..
I am available for just this sort of work at very competitive rates....

Good luck!

[divegyrl]

Originally Posted by rustuk

If you're on XP, make sure you get SP2 installed on it - Microsoft are suspending support for SP1 in the Autumn (or so I heard) and enable the personal firewall etc.

I thought that there was a prob with SP2 so have avoided putting it on, or am I terribly behind the times?

[rustuk]

Originally Posted by divegyrl

I thought that there was a prob with SP2 so have avoided putting it on, or am I terribly behind the times?

Initially there were a few apps that were a bit twitchy with SP2, but I've done loads of upgrades to it and only had a problem with one app on one machine so I'd say go fer it!
Microsoft are definately withdrawing support for SP1 this year, so us poor humans don't really have a lot of choice in the matter.....