Options
Problems with laptop - possible illegal sites visited?
JOHNOR
Posts: 3,163 Forum Member
✭✭✭
Hi,
I'm posting this on behalf of my Mother, she is in a terrible state and is worried sick. I'm assuming she is massively over-reacting but then again I don't know the first thing about computers. She is stressing me out!
Her laptop is full of virus's. She paid F secure (through Virgin media) to sort the problem out. They tried for hours to fix it last night, the engineer (this is all done online) told her that he needed to escalate it to another team as he could not solve it, she then claims something popped up on her laptop telling her that illegal sites had been visited and something along the lines of the high court. The only other people with access to her computer are my sister and her boyfriend.
She is ill with worry, has anyone got any idea what this could be? Should she be worried that the engineer couldn't fix it?
Second issue is that the company she works for requires you to log in to their websire/server thing to check your rota. She can't get in so she rang the IT dept who told her not to worry as there'd been an issue with it since yesterday afternoon. She is now convinced that her laptop has caused this issue for the whole of her company
Am I correct in thinking this is extremely unlikely and she's worrying for nothing?
I'm posting this on behalf of my Mother, she is in a terrible state and is worried sick. I'm assuming she is massively over-reacting but then again I don't know the first thing about computers. She is stressing me out!
Her laptop is full of virus's. She paid F secure (through Virgin media) to sort the problem out. They tried for hours to fix it last night, the engineer (this is all done online) told her that he needed to escalate it to another team as he could not solve it, she then claims something popped up on her laptop telling her that illegal sites had been visited and something along the lines of the high court. The only other people with access to her computer are my sister and her boyfriend.
She is ill with worry, has anyone got any idea what this could be? Should she be worried that the engineer couldn't fix it?
Second issue is that the company she works for requires you to log in to their websire/server thing to check your rota. She can't get in so she rang the IT dept who told her not to worry as there'd been an issue with it since yesterday afternoon. She is now convinced that her laptop has caused this issue for the whole of her company
Am I correct in thinking this is extremely unlikely and she's worrying for nothing? 0
Comments
I'm surprised that F Secure are trying to sort it out. How much did she pay? Are you sure this isn't a scam too?
Perhaps the best advice is to backup all personal data, and then reset the Pc to factory settings. Then, set it up with good antivirus software to stop this happening again. Some user education would also be a good idea. If she sets up an account here people would be happy to answer any questions.
Agreed with the above reply.
The 'illegal activity' message is defo a scam, i've had an email as well saying I need to go court (fake of course).
Backup personal files, pictures, documents, browser setting etc then wipe the whole computer (factory settings), then restore the backed-up personal files.
This should fix the issue, no problem!
I've come across hundreds of computers owned by less than savvy users (no disrespect) and they are often caused by downloading a virus disguised as something legitimate (like an email attachment).
One old man paid over £100 to an online company, who claimed his machine was infested with viruses and all they did was to install freely available software.
Get it cleaned up by someone who knows what they are doing, as many viruses are persistent and can do damage to installed software.
Otherwise, if you have backup discs or a backup partition stored on the HD, do a clean install.
Please don't let her be ripped off by large companies who pretend to know what they are doing.
If she is logging into a website to check the rota then it is unlikely, though not impossible, something on her laptop could have got onto the company system. That would be more likely if she was using a VPN connection or something like that to connect to the company file server to directly access files etc just as if she were in a company office plugged into the network directly. Just accessing a web page should not be as much of a problem.
It can be a real pain in the wotsits trying to sort out really badly infected computers, especially remotely. Sometimes the only sensible solution is to zap the entire hard drive into oblivion and start again from scratch, re-installing Windows and all the software she uses and restoring her data from a known clean back-up. Sometimes no matter how long you spend cleaning the system up you can never be 100% certain it has all been sorted and there isn't something hiding in a dark dingy corner just waiting to jump out and bite you.
But more worrying is how all this crap got onto the machine in the first place. I assume she has a decent anti virus program installed and running that you would hope would have caught at least some of the nasties.
Also, unfortunately, a lot of this stuff gets onto machines by "user error". Mainly by clicking on links in e-mails that you are not 10,000% sure about or installing stuff and not bothering to read all the screens that come up during installation so you don't notice all the other crap it's putting on your hard drive as well as the stuff you wanted.
with regards to restoring factory settings etc, i wouldn't know where to start. i assume if we take it to a computer repair shop they can sort it? she did have protection installed but she thinks it ran out
she is so worried that she has infected her work's computer system.
Regarding the backup and refresh of the PC, you can certainly do it yourself. If you post the make/model of the PC we can find specific instructions.
so kind, thank you. will find that out and post later.
The most important question to have answered before you even think about resetting back to "out of the box" state much less actually do it, is does she have a full working clean back-up of her important data? Don't even go near doing a reset without that!
Resetting the laptop back to it's raw state will zap everything on the hard drive, which includes everything she has created and stored on it. So it is vital that she has a full back-up of all data on the drive that she cannot afford to lose. But you have to be careful that if you do a back-up now that you don't also inadvertently let any nasty creep onto the back-up as well only to re-infect the cleaned up laptop.
As for the work computer system. if all she did was look at a webpage on the companies website then she is unlikely to have done any damage. It would be more likely if she was directly attached to the company's internal network with access to their file servers.