AntiVirus 2008 Infections Getting Pretty Sneaky
The other day I had a user call me to let me know their PC was getting an error message and that her co-worker had tried to fix it for her but couldn’t. The computer was off when I got there and when it booted up, it went to a blue screen of death with the problem listed as “Panic Stack Switch”, and, although that is an actual error message, it made me believe that it was a fake message, as I had never seen it before and had not searched for any occurrences online. While I was reading the error message though, the user hit her spacebar and the blue screen immediately went away to show me one of those your infected backgrounds that malware, such as Win Antivirus 2008 uses. You can imagine my surprise as the computer should not boot into windows after a blue screen of death, so this was yet another indicator that malware was involved, so I just went about cleaning the machine.
It was infected with the AntiVirus, or Win AntiVirus, XP 2008 malware, and was surprisingly simple to remove, certainly a lot easier than other infections I had dealt with, probably because Spybot and her antivirus software was blocking portions of it. All I had to do was delete the folder the malware was in, I believe it was called rchpcg or something similar, I used the Sysinternals program autoruns to remove any programs that were set to run automatically that shouldn’t, a couple had names something like blphctp9j0ea5.scr or lphctp9j0ea5j.exe or something similar, don’t quote me on those, and I went ahead and removed some of those programs that run in the background just to check to see if their software needs updated, etc, stuff no one really needs running all the time.
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Last Minute Back to School Computer Deals
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Dell
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Free 2Day Shipping on orders of $549 or more at Toshiba Direct. Offer ends 8.31.08. Shop Now!
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HP
HP Home & Office Back To School Buying Guide.
HP Home & Office Back To School Buying Guide.
Overstock Computer Deals and Coupons
Save $10 on orders of $150 or more at Overstock.com! Offer valid 8.8.08 to 8.11.08 ONLY.
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Computer and Electronic Deals from J&R Computers
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Lenovo IdeaCentre K210 Desktop PC LCD Bundle
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Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 Laptop Computer
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