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Serious prob, virus issue.
Ted C
Posts: 11,731 Forum Member
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I seem to have the mother of all viruses!
Basically a prompt came up on my pc yesterday whick looked like a genuine microsoft one, asked to agree to perform an upgrade, initially said no but I could not get rid of it...so ended up saying yes...
Then a screen comes up that looks like its from a police website, saying i have commited some sort of cyber crime and have to pay a fine online, via some sort of voucher (ukash?).
i know its bogus, the language and spelling are pretty bad, has pictures of stern looking policemen etc.
But i cant get rid of it, it has locked my pc. As soon as i log in it comes up and nothing will shift it. Ctrl alt delete does not work and i have no option to go to any other meni.
Even tried starting pc in safe mode, same thing happens.
Had the odd virus once before but this is the worst.
I was also about to renew my anti virus protection just before this happened. Bad timing.
Anyone got any knowledge of this and how to clear it, or any other suggestions?
Basically a prompt came up on my pc yesterday whick looked like a genuine microsoft one, asked to agree to perform an upgrade, initially said no but I could not get rid of it...so ended up saying yes...
Then a screen comes up that looks like its from a police website, saying i have commited some sort of cyber crime and have to pay a fine online, via some sort of voucher (ukash?).
i know its bogus, the language and spelling are pretty bad, has pictures of stern looking policemen etc.
But i cant get rid of it, it has locked my pc. As soon as i log in it comes up and nothing will shift it. Ctrl alt delete does not work and i have no option to go to any other meni.
Even tried starting pc in safe mode, same thing happens.
Had the odd virus once before but this is the worst.
I was also about to renew my anti virus protection just before this happened. Bad timing.
Anyone got any knowledge of this and how to clear it, or any other suggestions?
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http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1871661
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1864392
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1594552
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1774732
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1600047 etc...
A mate got this ransonware virus, so I fixed it by booting into Safe Mode, running Malwarebytes and an Avast full scan to fix it. It's a bugger to remove, but be patient.
I suggest you download and install SpywareBlaster, which hopefully will prevent this crap getting onto your PC in the first place.
http://www.brightfort.com/spywareblaster.html
I also use the Immunize feature in Spybot Search & Destroy.
http://www.safer-networking.org/dl
I've seen the screen myself appear on my PC, but it couldn't infect it further, due to my security measures. All I needed to do is kill Firefox by going into Task Manager <CTRL><ALT><DEL> and restoring Firefox without the ransonware tab.
I did a full full scan with Malwarebytes and Avast (fully updated), but both scans found nothing untoward.
I had to do that once before...i dont have that much stored on my laptop, and photos music files etc I have on other devices.
Its a bit of a pain, but at least I get my laptop back. And i must get the virus software reinstalled.
Only myself to blame on that score, should have sorted out the virus software earlier.
Yeah, Malwarebytes is good. It's found some malware that's been on my laptop in the past that was causing some problems. Avast has shown itself the odd time to be pretty good as well. I have a lot more confidence in Malwarebytes though.
Do you not have the disc that restores it to its factory settings?
... or checked for a recovery partition on the hard drive...
Doing a regular backup or image of your hard disk to an external hard drive would have been another way to quickly and easily resolve this problem. I use the free version of Macrium Reflect to make a monthly image of my system which if ever I need to restore my system will take around 15 minutes. Minimal fuss and minimal time spent downloading and reinstalling Windows updates.
Don't forget you also need to have a plan for when your hard disk fails as it surely will at some point. Restoring to a recent image of your system will always be preferential to simply going back to the factory image, especially as the latter may be a couple of years old and need a lot of updating and reinstallation of programs etc.
The usual thing of ensuring anything of value is backed up so at the worst case all you need to do is reinstall the OS and dump back your data while the updates are downloading
Yep.
Make sure you have re-distributable versions of applications such as Malwarebytes, SpywareBlaster, Spybot Search & Destroy, Avast, AVG, Microsoft Security Essentials etc. already downloaded onto your PC and/or USB stick (if not already installed) before you get infected with malware, in case you lose internet access.
Keep everything updated and try to avoid using more than one AV scanner, as that often causes clashes, e.g Avast or AVG, but not both. Sometimes you can get two or more AV scanners to work together, but you must be able to disable background scanning for all but one. Sometimes this works, but not always.