More of a question is what you can trust?

If your system has been compromised, how do you know that you can 'clean' everything up? And how do you know that you won't be exploited again?...

My advice if you wish to stay on Windows is to backup your personal data onto external media, reformat your HDD and then reinstall a clean version of Windows, run whatever antivirus/antimalware you have on a copy of your backups, and run from there.

You can give yourself a better chance of surviving various web exploits by using one of the other web browsers rather than IE. There's various technical reasons (ineffective sandbox, ActiveX, ...) why IE is more vulnerable than other browsers.


Or try Linux, or perhaps a Mac. So far they suffer no viruses.

Good luck,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Or try Linux, or perhaps a Mac. So far they suffer no viruses.

Well, very few virus' are out in the wild (as you say, "so far") for Linux, and ostensibly for Mac. Most of what is out in the wild has been patched against, and most of the still effective ones are more geared towards servers than desktop installations.

In addition, with most of the recent popular distros you have to be "intentionally stupid" in order for one of these virus' to be installed; i.e., running as superuser as a matter of course, or running applications that access the Internet with superuser permissions.

Of course, a properly set up, administered, and run Windows installation has just as sufficient security as any other OS. The problem is that, up until Vista, Windows fairly well defaulted to an unsecured installation. You had to set it up for security or be very careful what you clicked on or downloaded. Though I never had any particular problems with it, I've read that XP was the worst offender in this area.

Even with Vista, it is much too easy to override security, but at least the security measures are default instead of the other way around. It is always to one's advantage to leave these security procedures in place. When you run certain programs or install, just answer that you trust the action that is about to take place. What is so onerous about that? And it may save your bacon.

I generally run Linux, but I maintain Windows in a dual- (or multi-) boot installation for various software that I just can't find a replacement for (or run) under Linux. I currently have Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Sabayon installed on this laptop, in addition to Vista installed on this computer. Ubuntu for day-to-day, and the others for evaluation.

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73 from Glenn - KG5UC

Or try Linux, or perhaps a Mac. So far they suffer no viruses.

... I've read that XP was the worst offender in this area.

That's when I swapped to a Linux desktop. My development system was then upgraded from Windows 3.11WfW -> Linux. Beautiful improvements in many ways and a beautiful breath of fresh air for development work. (I'd already converted a load of stuff to run on WinXP... :-( ... The convert and run proved to be much quicker on Linux.)

... I generally run Linux, but I maintain Windows in a dual- (or multi-) boot installation for various software that I just can't find a replacement for (or run) under Linux. I currently have Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Sabayon installed on this laptop, in addition to Vista installed on this computer. Ubuntu for day-to-day, and the others for evaluation.

I ran a couple of 'essential' Windows apps on WINE on Linux for about 6 months until I converted to alternatives for them. For all the rest of what Windows might offer, the swap over to Linux was far too easy.

At the time, I tried about three distros of the day before settling on Mandrake (Mandriva). Curiously, I use two distros for everyday use and usually keep up to date on two others, so you might say I've moved up to using 4.

Getting away from all the "registration" and "anti-virus" malarky saves a lot of time.


Perhaps the hardest part is to not run out of patience when fixing others' same old problems for whatever 'might have happened' to the Microsoft Windows on their machines...

Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

I ran into a similar virus or blackmail just yesterday which resulted in:
1) "Your computer is infected" desktop background.
2) Internet Security 2010 was the name of the application that offered to remove the scam.
...
Task manager and Internet Explorer do not work still.

Ugh!

Last month I cleaned up a system with the same malware. It's not enough to clean up with a windowsbased system because this malware use some files witch are not visible when booting an MS-system (even a clear one from a live-cd)!
I used a LINUX live-cd for the virusscan and magicly there are some more infected files to kill which i could not see under MS-boot.
Maybe this helps.

__W__

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