Infected!

December 11th, 2008 by Potato

Trend-Micro for a number of years, together with UWO, offered students here copies of PC-Cillin/Internet Security for $15. From that you could protect as many computers as you pleased, the theory being it was worth the subsidy to keep the UWO network secure. This year however, it’s $15 per computer, and you have to go up to campus to physically pick up each license. I picked up three licenses for our computers recently, knowing that I needed one for my new build and both my laptop and Wayfare’s laptop, which expired early December. We both thought Wayfare’s desktop was on a different schedule… unfortunately we were wrong and it expired this week as well.

Figuring that her computer is behind the hardware firewall and that she “doesn’t do much” with it, and not wanting to pay and have to go up to campus, we decided to try out a different, free, antivirus product. We went with AVG, one I’ve been using on my server computer for some time (ever since PC-Cillin stopped working on WinME). Well, within a day she was infected with some sort of browser hijacking trojan. It keeps throwing popups at her as she tries to surf, and does it even in safe mode.

So, right quick I switched it up to Trend Micro Internet Security for her… unfortunately, perhaps because it was already infected, or perhaps because it’s a nasty new exploit they haven’t solved yet, Trend Micro wasn’t able to fix it either. I’m still trying to figure this thing out, and am sincerely hoping I won’t have to resort to a reformat…

One Response to “Infected!”

  1. Potato Says:

    Well, I managed to find the entries in the registry that were causing the virus/trojan to launch, so the popups have stopped, but even after reinstalling Trend Micro Internet Security, it still wouldn’t find anything wrong, which still has me a little worried about what’s going on in there…