Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

General av and anti-malware discussion

<< < (2/4) > >>

MilesAhead:
Guess  if it's not a hijack the thrill is gone.

IainB:
I don't find hijacks really that much of a thrill. It can take hours to clean up all the files and hooks from a PC that has been infected with a trojan/hijack.
The best way I have found of cleaning up a PC infected with a trojan/hijack is to use Malwarebytes.    :Thmbsup:
The best way I have found to avoid/reduce the risk of getting a PC infected by a trojan/hijack is to use both a virus checker and Malwarebytes PRO together. They are complementary.

The virus package I have used (since it came out for free) is Micrsoft Security Essentials.    :Thmbsup:

MilesAhead:
The pun didn't even occur to me. I meant the hijack of the SciFi thread. Once it was on its own topic, the malware thread petered out is my point.

IainB:
Oh, I see. I wondered why you wrote what you did.
Yes, this malware thread did seem to have petered out - that's why I made the comment, just to help things along a bit.
The subject is not necessarily likely to be all that interesting to too many people. Probably the time when people are most likely to get really interested in malware discussions is when they actually have an active case to be concerned with on their own, or someone else's PC.
For example, I recently had a major problem with one of my laptops (the one my daughter uses), and it seemed like it might have been a trojan/hijack or something, but the virus and malware protection setup on the laptop was identical to what is on my main laptop, and I couldn't see how it could have been infected with anything - given the security blanket I had implemented.

I scoured all the forums and ran tests on the laptop every which way. Over an elapsed period of 4 or 5 weeks, I spent hours and hours investigating the problem, but to no avail, until I happened on a post on a forum where someone had documented the exact same problem, and he had discovered a fix for it in a web posting.
The causal problem was apparently a corrupted system file, in an area that you would not have intuitively expected to be associated with the problem. I still don't know how the corruption could have been caused though (incomplete root cause analysis).
Most people would probably have given up trying to figure it out and re-installed Windows, but I dislike such an approach, and in any event saw no need to dicsombobulate myself with a re-install and all that that implies. I happen to prefer identifying the problem, the cause and fixing it. Anyhow, I eventually got there, but cannot stop the problem from recurring because I still do not know how it might have happened in the first place. That's a result of an incomplete root cause analysis.
Actually, I might make write a separate discussion about this, as it potentially could be tremendously useful to someone who finds themselves with the same problem in future.

barney:
Not to change focus from AV & anti-malware, but IainB brings up an interesting - and ofttimes intrusive - point.

I recently installed XAMPP on an eight (8 ) GB USB stick.  But every time I tried to run it, it complained that the path to MySQL was wrong.  Hm-m-m ... MySQL, Apache, & PHP had been removed from that machine.  Did I have something that had been hijacking my MySQL data?  Spent a couple of days with MBAM, Comodo, a couple of other malware and keylog sniffers, all to no avail.  Then I loaded regedit to search for mention of MySQL.  That mention was massive!  I spend a good hour ferreting out references to MySQL, then pondering whether to delete a particular reference - not all of them were directly related.  For example, more than a few were for Open Office - a program that has not been on that particular machine for a good six (6) months.

After the registry surgery, the portable XAMPP install worked just fine.

The thing here is that what appeared to be a malware manifestation was naught - naught  :P? - more than a couple of very sloppy uninstalls.  The files had been removed from the hard drive, but references had not been removed from the registry.  So I was getting hints of infestation, but MBAM, nor any other detector of evil, could never have found it.

(Before someone tells me to use Revo/Comodo/Geek uninstallers ... I did  :P.  But those can do a good job only on the installs they've audited.)

Just a passing thought, that even if it quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it may not be a duck.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page