Malware Problems and Solutions.. continued

Well, I mentioned about some activity in my previous post that was mainly because of M.exe getting into my USB drive and infecting some other files. The link which I posted in that post was of some help but not complete. I did whatever was mentioned in the post , only to realise later though it was not "recommended" to run such anti-malware products without any help from the forum moderators.

Though it dint really led to any more problems, but I would also now recommend to take help from forum moderators before you proceed. How it works is : You contact the forum moderator stating your problem, s/he will ask you to install some utility , run it and post the log online, s/he will come up with some scripts and ask you to run them again and then post the log again. A brief about this in this Wiki link

Its very generous of these moderators to provide us support, but its generally a time taking process esp if you two are in different time zones. And quite a lot of times, the problem just refuses to go away. Somewhat similar things happened with me and now after M.exe attack, my PC has "reader_s.exe" malware files.

Similar problems have encountered by some other users:

i) http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t204663.html
ii) http://miekiemoes.blogspot.com/2009/02/virut-and-other-file-infectors-throwing.html

The second link is blog from Miekiemoes Brugge actually and she percieves formatting a better option sometimes, to which I agree too. Sometimes you have to just let it go :)

And once you have decided to format and re-install your Windows, just dont forget to follow these simple steps before going online.

http://web.mit.edu/ist/products/winxp/advanced/security-newmachine.html

Cheers!
MoA

Malware Problems & Solution

For the past few days, my PC back at home is behaving strangely. Well the first reason which comes to anyone's mind is of course virus. Well, yes it 's true it was infected by some malicious things . Blame should be put on me and only me for introducing my PC to this malicious thing. I am already done with the formatting and re-installation of Windows XP and was also done with installing the Norton Anti virus 2005 and then I observed the same strange things happening again. Let me write those things down here which led me to format my PC:

1. Every time I inserted my USB drive, virus alert would be generated that a file named M.exe has been removed from the drive. After this alert I would see an autorun.inf file which instructs to run M.exe from USB drive. Despite repeated formats of USB drive, the same problem surfaced again and again proving that it was the PC which was doing this to my USB drive.

2. The moment I would be connected to internet, I would get some hundreds of alerts from Norton AV's mail scan application that "your message to (somevague_emailid) has been scanned successfully. All these alerts would eventually slow down my system and I would have to kill ccApp.exe from Task Manager. I read few things about this ccApp.exe on some forums and thought this could be the culprit ( I am still not sure about it though)

All this led me to format my OS drive and reinstall the OS. After doing some more research on removal of this malicious things on PC, I came across D-A-L Free Computer Help link. Its tells about quite a long process of removing malwares from your PC, but looks quite good. I have not completed this process, but I am almost in the middle of it.

In case someone is facing similar problems, s/he may try this out and may be its of some help.

Cheers!
MoA