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As an IT professional, I consider myself to be more careful than your average Internet user when it comes to things like viruses. I only download things from trusted sources, I have a virus scanner running all the time and I try to restrict myself to known, safe sites. This last point though, becomes more difficult whe you’re using something like Entrecard.
Like many Entrecard users, I have around 300 bookmarks that I use in order to maximise the number of sites that I visit, and to restrict myslef to those that I’ve visited before that I deemed both “intersting” and “safe”. This allows me to open the sites in blocks of 10 and quickly scan them for new, interesting content and to drop my Entrecard on their widget.
This worked really well until yesterday, when one of my regular sites suddenly hit me with a full-screen popup ad, which bypassed my Firefox popup blocker! By the time I’d closed the popup, there was a new window open telling me that I needed to install some new XP Antivirus software, which had only a “Accept and bgein install” button!
From the task manager, I found that this was a real program that was running so I quickly killed it, only to find that I had a new desktop wallpaper, with a replica of a dialog showing that I had a virus threat! At this point, I tried to put my original wallpaper back, only to find that the tab on the dialog box had been removed!
Further investigation revealed a whole host of new applications, with seemingly random names, and some new entries in my registry. I cleaned the PC by hand, but it was too late and the damage was done - my PC was useless!
Facing the prospect of delivering a training course next week from my laptop, but being in Birmingham at a client, I had no choice but to change my plans and make the 2 hour drive to my office to re-image my laptop. This process was relatively painless, but has left me wary and missing a few key applications. FUrther research seems to suggest that some form of trojan made it onto my PC, which tried to then install the XPAntivirus virus.
I would urge you all to be ultr-cautious at the moment, and to watch out for some research that I’ll be doing into personal firewalls!!!
August 24th, 2008 at 2:44 am
If your computer install Avast software,should detect this virus.
i recommended you using firefox addin (linky) to manage your 300 bookmark.
August 24th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Hi Wongsk,
Thanks for your comment! Unfortunatley, since it was my work laptop, I can’t install a different anti-virus, so I’m stuck with McAfee!
As for my links, I’ll take a look at Linky, but at this stage I don’t believe I have a problem managing them per se, as I make extensive use of the new Firefox 3 tagging. I also find Foxmarks (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410) extremely useful for backing up and synchronising my bookmarks across multiple PC’s!
-John.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Hey there. You could have used Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Free to use and gets rid of that particular virus easily. Or if you couldn’t install anything you could have run Kaspersky’s free online scanner which won’t remove the stuff but will tell you where the files are so you can delete them yourself. When I was in a CyberDefense competition with my college the hackers dropped that sucker on our computers which sucked to get rid of but I figured it out and I’m glad because now I deal with at least 2 clients a week that get smacked with this and Antivirus 2008/2009. IT SUCKS!