Backup saved my butt

Steinberg Lounge
1

Picked up a nasty trojan yesterday. Just from surfing the web. Symptons were those fake alerts - “Your hard disk has failed click here to install pro verson and fix” yeah, right

Hundreds of these messages. Explorer showed half of C drive missing. MacaFee reported a trojan detected and quarantine but the fake error messages kept reappearing and Macafee kept saying it fixed it. Couldn’t read the drive from a command prompt to delete the offender.

I backup once a week to an external USB using Acronis True Image Home 2010. Time to see if the rescue cd actually works? After some fumbling and panic that the usb disk wasn’t found I figured it out. Don’t use the wizard just use the standard recovery. I have two drives in the system and back them as two separate disk files. Took a chance and only restored the system disk left the data disk alone.

Started the restore went to bed. It worked! Yay!

I actually noticed this happening a couple of times last week from different sites. In each case Macafee said a new program wants net access. I blocked it, found it, and deleted it. These were all in c:/user/me/appdata/local/temp and came as a pair of exes, one in appdata/local and one in appdata/local/temp. I was able to delete them. But this one installed to C:/Programdata and obfuscated the drive directory so I couldn’t get to it.

I use Win 7 x64 sp1 uptodate and IE9 up to date so apparently the wonderful hacker community has figured out a way to install evil payloads just by visiting a site and clicking on an innocuous video link - at least that’s what I think is going on. MS needs to close the hole and Macafee needs to up their detection and quarantine.

2

Good that you were able to restore your system! My work machine went down last month from a trojan (along with 4 other machines on the corporate network). It took the IT department three days to disinfect it. They run ESET NOD32, with several layers of firewall, which didn’t provide enough protection.

I gave up on McAfee on my home machines, and now use Kaspersky on all of them.

3

We’re using Kaspersky at home, the office, the studio, all good. Its a great product.

4

Macafee is free from my ISP, Cox.net, else I’d use Kapersky also.

5

Hiya Ted, long time no read. :wink:

I use D-BAN to wipe partitions before using Acronis to restore a fresh OS install. :sunglasses:

6

Aloha and to all mac users reading this thread.

Don’t be too smug while reading this .

This kind of on-line crap will be soon heading our way as well.

Be prepared.

{‘-’}

7

I think the next scary round of virus and trojans will be aimed at the android and iOS systems.
“Siri, tell me tomorrow’s weather”
“Pay me first ya cheap b’strd”

8

ROFLMAO!!!
{‘-’}

9

Glad you could restore your system, Ted!

I use Kaspersky as well, BTW, it’s much better than MacAfee and AVG etc.

10

I have used macafee,bull guard,avg and kaspersky. I have had virus on macafee and avg. kaspersky and bull guard were ok but for the last two years I have been using Comodo’s free firewall and avast’s free anti virus on my separate windows xp internet pc without one virus…these programs will completely stop me from accessing a web page that is holding a virus or anything like that and tell me when and why it stops me.

Anyone looking for a good free security for their pc give them a try they are easy as good as kaspersky or bull guard.

I know its not an option for everyone but realy consider a second pc for internet and leave your audio one off the web.
My old premium4 cost buttons and works great for web browsing and my daw is safe not being on the internet.

Damb pirate’s and hackers

grrrrr