faithofadragon

welp heres the background story



wife friend gets computer virus on her netbook and doesnt notice



wifes friend typed in CC info, identity gets stolen, few hundred dollars later,



wifes friend says "f*ck it" and gives me netbook



now im tryin to fix this blasted thing, normally i would just swipe and start over, but she doesnt have any disks, paperwork, info, programs, keys



basically its the stupid "xp antivirus" bullshit, which infact, is a virus(wifes friend was actually dumb enough to pay for it....) wont let me download ANYTHING at all to correct this, add/remove programs doesnt load, task manager doesnt load, in safe mode i can run mcafee(came with the compy....not my choice) and it will delete 5 out of 6 viruses, but wont tell me the location/name/registry location of the last one



im thinkin of tryin to run ubuntu off a thumb drive but i donno how much space is needed for it, i only have a 1 gig drive



tips on how to fix this stupid thing? hit it with a hammer?

accent03

Dude it happened to me just go to www.malwarebytes.com it can be reversed. Mine would let me get on the internet unless i restarted it and opened the internet RIGHT before the virus would boot up. give it a try and let me know.

TibbyTurbo

+1 on what he said^

DTN

-1 on what both of them said. Malware bytes is only good on known viruses. I've found about 40% probability of complete removal of any virus... Even then, you will still wonder if there is a sleeping zombie bot-net app running on your computer. If I were to write a virus today, it would not be known to malware bytes until they obtained and analyzed a copy of it.



Windows is susceptable to viruses because of technical weaknesses they introuduced in the name of user experience. My wife just got a new computer from Asus 2 days ago. She was complaining that it was very slow today. Well, the hard disk light was on and I assumed it was doing search and catalouging... This morning I woke up and the hard disk light is stil on. She has used the laptop to research death for her psychology class and that's it. One of the sites she visited introduced some sort of malware to her computer.



Ubuntu will not run well on 1gig. You need a minimum of 4 gigs. There is an option to resize the hard disk and run side-by-side during setup. Use that option and dual boot.



I can't speak highly enough or reccommend enough that people use FREE Linux and keep Windows usage to necessary times only. It takes a bit of time to learn, just like Windows did, but you will get benefeits immediately when you see how fast firefox will load out-of-box on Ubuntu. All the malware in the world will not allow Windows to modify Ubuntu's EXT4 partitions. Windows cannot read Linux formats. Linux can read Windows formats and that's the way it should be because that way Linux remains safe from anything that happens on the computer. You can also use Linux to recover Windows because of this property.



The point is, the best setup is to

*run Linux by default for security and speed of the machine

*Set up a virtual machine with windows in it

*run windows in full screen or transparrent mode when you need it

when you get some malicious software, just roll back your virtual machine to a previous saved state, it's a full, fool-proof recovery of windows which is not possible when windows is in control of itself.

faithofadragon

That's the thing, I can dl malwarebytes but it won't let me run the program

DTN

Its called an armored virus. It puts up protection to keep itself on your computer. Usually they have a downloader as well to introduce a polymorphic, and a root kit so it is impossible to remove without complete distruction of the drive. The only files you should consider safe at this point are pictures and plain text documents. The problem is that hooking up an external storage media while windows is running will likely transmit malicious software to that media.



Get an Ubuntu CD and boot in "try it" mode then get the files you want off the windows hard disk. After that, use the built in Installer to install ubuntu. Go to the ubuntu software center and install virtualbox. Use virtualbox to create a virtual windows machine. Then insert a windows disk into the cd rom drive and mount it to the virtual machine. After that, boot up, install windows. Finally "save the machine state" so you have a good point to roll back to.

faithofadragon

It's a net book no cd Rom drive

DTN

On ubuntu.com there are instructions on how to create a live usb drive which functions the same as a cdrom. You need a 500 meg or higher memory stick.



You may be able to activate a restore mode by holding C, 0, Z or insert while booting your netbook normally as well.

187sks

Try to get Enditall 2 onto the machine and running. After running it you might be able to run malwarebytes Anti-Malware. There is about a 90% chance that an updated version of MBAM will clean this for you. It's not that MBAM is the be-all-end-all of PC cleaning software, but it's especially good at dealing with rogue software in my experience. Whether or not that helped, the next thing to run is ComboFix.



As a last ditch effort you can run HijackThis. It is capable of removing damn near anything, but it's not user friendly and if you do something wrong you can irreparably damage Windows.

DTN

That's the thing.. Those programs can only read what they see.



Here's two terms to remember:

Rootkits- They embed themselves in critical portions of the system and are undetectable by the user or the system because they run at a level higher then the system, in the Windows kernel... As a part of the kernel itself.

Polymorphic- They change themselves so their "signature" is never the same.



Once a virus obtains Rootkit status, you cannot ever clean it from the machine. A polymorphic virus can infect thousands of files on your computer. You will never realize it.. One day you will play an MP3 and then that MP3 will download several viruses onto your computer, one of them may be a rootkit.