Computer Virus Stories

[Da Orky Man]

Hello my dear, twisted friends. I've just spent a good half-hour now grappling with a rather nasty virus. Why was it nasty? Well, what would you think if this, or your countries' equivalent, came up:

(Down the page it asks you for £/$/?100 in order to forget you little misdeamor. it also tells you that, if you don't pay, you are getting arrested with 72 hours)

Anyway, I know it looks much like a virus now, but at the time, I was wondering, in a panicky kind of way, whether or not I had lent my computer to anyone recently.

Oh, did I forget to mention that it stopped me from accessing my desktop at all? And that restarting it had no effect?

I eventually killed it off by going into Safe-Mode cmd line and running a system restore to yesterday, but I digress.


So, any of you got any similar stories?

 

[renegade7]

A couple years back some policemen came to my house and took my computer and dragged me to the station, saying that my computer had been used to upload pirated materials. It wasn't. Apparently there is a virus that creates a hidden partition on your HDD, disguising itself as a windows update, and uses it as a mini-server with which to seed torrent materials. Luckily, they figured out what was going on and I was let off.

 

[lRookiel]

I got that virus, it looked slightly different but it said the same thing. I did a regedit to stop it launching on startup, then did a system restore, BAM!

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

I actually just helped a friend get rid of that virus the other day. It did and said basically all the same stuff, only it claimed to be the FBI.

As for a personal story of my own... this one happened about two months ago. I get to work, and one of my coworkers is panicking that her computer is infected with a virus. I offer to take a look at it since the guy our company contracts for tech support always takes his sweet time.

If I tried to click on -anything- I'd get a message saying that the program had been blocked due to an infection. After a few moments a "virus scanner" opened automatically and warned us of there being like 70-something active infections, and that we needed to subscribe to the scanning service before they could be removed. If we closed the scanner, it would just reopen a few seconds later.

I asked my coworker if she did anything out of the ordinary with her computer that morning. She said that she had received an e-mail from UPS containing an attachment with shipping information that she downloaded and opened. I asked her if she was actually waiting on any packages from UPS, to which she said no, and I mentally facepalmed. She went on to say that she opened the file but it didn't actually have any shipping information in it, so it must have been nothing. I mentally facepalmed again.

The IT guy called and said that he wouldn't be able to arrive for another hour and a half. He charges the company $100 just to show up, and like $50 per hour. I hate dealing with the guy, so I put Malware Bytes on a flash drive, put it on the infected computer, scanned it and removed the virus, then called the IT guy to tell him he wasn't needed. $150 for a 5 minute fix is ridiculous.

 

[yuval152]

Only once, I just opened up task manager and killed it. Some maleware bytes and that's it.

 

[Hoplon]

Had some mal ware hijack my browser search.

Good old Spybot zapped it.

 

[teqrevisited]

I had one about 8 or 9 years ago, I can't remember what the name of it was but it was stubborn as hell. It was one of those fake AV programs that spams you with pop-up balloons in the lower right telling you to buy a license for their malware so that it can "remove" the security threats that it makes up to scare you. I do remember that ending and restarting explorer.exe made it disappear though.

Ran SS&D first. Didn't work so then I tried MWB. Didn't work. I couldn't be arsed with it any more so I just reformatted.

Another one that I got a while before that was this browser hijack that spammed the screen with new windows running javascript. I found the file that was causing it but it kept copying itself and none of the above methods worked so I had it sent away to be sorted.

Nowadays my good friend Kaspersky stops them before they get in and it didn't cost me a penny thanks to my bank.

 

[Lucem712]

I had one on an ole desktop I was using while I was waiting for a charger to come in. It downloaded in the background all of sudden (I had gotten far too comfortable with Linux and it's permissions). Turned out to be one of those that mimics an 'anti-virus' suite, disabling the internet and other programs.

Had to go into safe mode and managed to get rid of it after awhile.

 

[Zirat]

I've gotten something like that before.
Well, twice.

Aparently Rogue-ware like that can come in from anwywhere, and it caused me to have to wipe my hard drive.
Twice.

Needless to say I was very sad on those two occasions.

 

[Vuliev]

Haven't ever had a virus/malware/worm/etc. on any of my personal computers. Though there is the time that one of the classrom tablets at my uni somehow caught a virus in the middle of a review session one day--pretty sure they had to reformat it.

 

[Stomperchomper]

Snip

I had one like that before, although mine shut everything down, couldn't run ANY program, not even control panel and what not. Fortunately, there was a brief (several seconds) period upon starting up where I could access the control panel.

Took me a few tries, but I eventually killed the process before it could start running and then I was finally able to download Malware Bytes and remove it completely.

 

[Risingblade]

Had an antivirus virus kept telling me my computer was infected and wouldnt' let me uninstall it

 

[NLS]

My stupid cousin in Bolivia managed to infect my computer with a virus through an USB flash drive he had. Luckily, the machine wasn't connected to any network, so I could take my sweet time to contain it without spreading it further. Except for spreading itself through flash drives and disabling certain tools like the task manager it didn't do much. Managed to get rid of it through some work from my linux partition and regedit. It wasn't easy though, as it kept propagating itself on random folders until you finally removed the source copy from which it originated, which was constantly changing.
Crisis averted though, I also deleted all the unaffected files he had and blamed it as collateral damage, just to teach him a lesson.