last week, when i went to my dance studio's website, a website i have been to numerous times, and a firefox security warning appeared telling me that the website i was trying to access had been determined to have been hijacked and contaminated with Trojans, viruses and executing scripts, well, i read and heeded the warning and just gave up trying to access that website. i decided to try again later. i gave it a few days. 7 to be exact. today, a week later, i go back to the website and again firefox declares the website malicious and this time, what do i do? like a dumb@$$, i decided to go to the website using IE, "just to see what IE says".
stupid! stupid! stupid!
how could i ever turn my back on firefox; mistrust it's reporting; assume it has faulted? for when IE pulled up the website, a 2-second display of the infamous blue screen of death (only without the blue screen) naming some page fault error (but who can read that fast anyhow) occurred followed by an immediate and complete system shutdown. upon rebooting and restarting Windows, same thing: a 2-second display of the infamous blue screen of death (only without the blue screen) naming some page fault error (but who can read that fast anyhow) occurred followed by an immediate and complete system shutdown.
well, this is it: i've been infected. this sux.
i'm going to try everything before reloading the OS because, well, we don't have English Windows OS CD; my machine was "magically" prepared by the tech-editor i replaced, a thank you to him by the way.
a call to my dance studio to ask kindly WTF? didn't get me very far. after letting him know that the machine hosting his website was infected (it was disinfected earlier this week by some computer experts according to him) and letting him know that my machine was now infected, and asking if his local machine was infected too and if it was, did he get it disinfected earlier this week and how. he said, yes, it was infected, yes they did get it disinfected but that he didn't know how the experts did it. so, i asked him to send me instructions or call me with news as soon as it becomes available. hopefully he's on the phone with them right now.
but i'm not holding my breath.
loading the 'last known good configuration' did not work. so i sit here typing this blog post in 'Safe Mode With Networking', personal and working files freshly backed up onto the file server, while ClamWin, my virus protection software is scanning the hard drives now and will hopefully find the wormy worms which i can then eliminate and annihilate. anyway, all i can do right now is wait for the virus scanning process to finish. i suspect it will take another hour or so. ahhhh.
stupid! stupid! stupid!
i'm sorry firefox. i love you.
i'd rather be dancing~~
when i get a solution i will be posting here in case it happens to someone else.
initial warning
warning details
UPDATE: it ~was~ a blue screen which looked black because it was up for such a short amount of time that the color didn't make it to my eyes' memory. anyway, i caught a photo of the blue screen of death on my first try with Inna's cell phone (with the delay of the camera phone's shudder and the 2-second spontaneous appearance of the blue screen of death, I impressed myself with my precise and lucky timing). it was a good quality image which i could zoom in on and read clearly (on Inna's phone) but sending it as an attachment to my shitty phone degraded the picture quality and then when i forwarded it to my email from my phone i got a tiny non-informative photo, displayed below. btw, the blue screen of death pointed to a specific problem preventing Windows from loading, some SYS file for some driver in the Windows\system32 folder. once i removed it (renamed and moved into another folder) and restarted, the OS loaded and all was fine ... computer was operating as expected with only a slightly discouraging message from the OS saying that the system suffered some severe error and suggested i send a report to Microsoft, which i did not. ... but still yet, things were performing as expected ... until i opened up IE (just ~opened~ with home page of Google) and then, crashola.
here's another photo that i tried taking with my phone during one of the subsequent crashings. the meat and potatoes of the informative information of the blue screen of death being at the bottom, a part of the screen that hadn't displayed fully by the time the super fast shudder closed its eye. eventually a full OS reinstall was necessary.
2 comments:
Hi Sue, sorry to hear this has happened to you through a website you enjoy visiting. The last trojan my PC was inflicted with used a clever system of piggy-backing known, safe processes so it was hard to detect. I had to study which processes were trying to access the net or sending more data than usual, and then find and delete the files which were creating those rogue, pseudo processes. Not so easy when the trojan kept changing the name of the files!
In the end I used a combination of Spybot Search & Destroy and crucially to clear up the final, stubborn files, Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal tool.
Your version of IE obviously needs the latest security updates.
Hope you beat the nasty soon!
Thanks to Bluewave, we are reminded once again that misery loves company. A busted foot, infested intestines, a sweaty moldy mattress, an infected computer - no wonder you want to go to a secret life and just be alone. But guess what – there’s no place like that. If there was it would be crowded anyway with every other peace seeker.
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