Saturday, September 5, 2009

Grrrr....

So, I was uploading pictures to Photobucket this evening, and I got slapped with a virus. It's called Win32/Cryptor, and it's nasty. When I log on to my desktop PC with my account, the computer locks up and I can't do anything. Luckily, I have a second account on the machine that I am able to use. I'm in the process of cleaning this bugger up. This is so not how I was planning to spend my evening. My hubby is working late, so I was looking forward to a night of Simming and blogging. GRRRRR!! On the bright side, my data appears to be safe, so that's good news for the Megahood.

I just want to put out a warning to other blog authors to be careful when using Photobucket (or really any website with third-party ads). One inadvertent click can bring your PC much pain. BTW, I'm writing this from my netbook which will no longer be used to edit photos on Photobucket!

7 comments:

  1. Oh, I think that was the same virus I had when I first got my new PC! It's a nasty one, that's for sure!

    Hope you can get your PC all cleaned up!

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  2. Thanks for the warning. I'm thinking I should pick up adblocker and noscript for Firefox. There's been a lot of this going around it seems.

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  3. Grrr, I hate virues. Try this as well: http://www.malwarebytes.org/

    I use this all the time along with my anti virus scanner. Hope you're able to get everything cleaned up.

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  4. Sullivan, Lunar, and Riverdale, thank you all so much for your support! I ended up having to reinstall the OS. It took me all day, but in a way I'm glad because I got rid of a lot of programs I wasn't using anymore. I was able to save all my data, so my Simmies are safe. I haven't re-installed Sims 2 yet. All those expansion packs and stuff packs. Yikes! But I will get to it.

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  5. Lunar, thanks for the tip about FF and Adblocker and noscript. I have already installed FF and Adblocker. I'll install noscript tomorrow. I did see some rumblings in the comments for Adblocker that it is not as effective with FF 3.5 as it was with 3.0. Hopefully, the author will update Adblocker soon.

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  6. Riverdale,

    I did use Malwarebytes in my cleaning process. That virus was sneaky and tried to block me from running it. I had to rename MB's exe to get around it. I found some great tips for cleaning up the PC at http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407. I highly recommend this process if you are unfortunate to fall victim. This process did clean up my PC, but I was feeling paranoid and chose to do the OS reinstall anyway.

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  7. DD picked up something nasty from Skype last year, so I had to re-format her hard drive. I think doing that is easier than messing around trying to clean up. Also, I usually know just enough to be dangerous. Or I do something & can't remember how I did it.

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