Computer Tips -Tech Info

The first problem I ran into in cleaning up after my infested Windows XP image was this error message. One of the first things I do in cleaning an infested system is try to kill off running process that look suspect (or at least identify them.) On using ctrl-alt-delete I got the message “Task manager […]

OK, I mentioned that I infested a virtual machine with the current WMF 0-day exploit. First I should probably clarify. An exploit is a means of getting in to a system. The payload is the software that is installed. In the case of my experience there was a long list of pests installed. Given that […]

There’s a joke that many people bring out when new Windows viruses hit big…. it goes along the lines of, “download a fix here” and the link points to a knoppix linux livecd download, or a Mandriva download disk, fedora/etc… Some say linux isn’t affected by as many viruses because it lacks market share, I […]

All in all, what I’ve documented was a bit over three hours worth of attention to the machine (much more for the full scans, but I didn’t have to stand and watch them.) I didn’t document a sidetrip to a second antivirus scanner. It’s nice to see a system cleaned up that had been so […]

Before I get things wrapped up, I like to scan rinse and repeat until the scans come up clean. So, this scan of AVG gives a chance to delete the archive entry I mentioned the first pass it took. And spybot get’s updated from the internet and re-runs. All looks clean there… Ad-aware get’s an […]

Ok – about 22 or 23 critical updates for Windows ME. I’m suspecting it’s never visited the Windows update site. While it’s going I make sure that the adware scanners and antivirus scanner get to pull updates from the web as well. It’s also time to scan for running network services that shouldn’t be running. […]

There are so many “wolves in sheeps clothing” or maybe I should say wolves in sheepdogs clothing… Anyway, so many nasty malware’s that pose as protective utilities. Spyaxe, spytrooper, spy sherriff, etc. There is a tool that is specialized towards removing these. Smitrem which is short for smitfraud removal. (After the viral name of one […]

All right, now it’s time to give ad-aware a spin. I like being able to use several spyware scanners to get full coverage and cleaning. Ad-aware and spybot s&d are usually my first two choices. Realize that I’ve already taken a pass at this machine with AVG, BHODemon (for the browser helper objects) and Spybot […]

Ok, another reboot after the BHO cleaning. Things are a good deal more responsive now, less disc swapping going on. (I suspect that those three missing BHO entries may have been causing the slow down, but I don’t know.) Installing wintop so that processes can be monitored. Also, getting spybot S&D *(search and destroy) installed […]

Ok, it’s BHOdemon time… installed from cd and on starting: BHOdemon bhotb-all.html not found, no web connection downloading on other machine. Finally get it to work copying from another machine. But I had to change the Windows ME to show full filenames to help troubleshoot why it couldn’t find the file (naming problem.) (There seems […]