Virus!
Virus!
Look, I occasionally poke around on the internet, looking for pictures of the ladies. No big deal. But yesterday was perfectly innocent – I’d gone looking for sound files for my new game Time Tripper. The muzzleloader I’d gotten off SoundBible.com was okay but it had someone saying “Ready… aim… Fire!” – not what you are going to want to hear over and over when five revolutionary war soldiers are firing at you.
So last night I googled “Muzzleloader wav”. Found some sites. Went onto the first. Then Microsoft Security Essentials lit off.
Normally it never gets a chance – its big brother, MalwareBytes, always catches things. I follow the suggestions of the local computer shop, going to Malware (full version) and MSE. McAfee held the coat of the Trojan that got in a few years back (MalwareBytes got it out). And Norton let in something that was so bad, I had to reformat my computer (Malware could find it but even after it was gone, my system was clobbered and ran choppy). So now I run the pair and have been very satisfied.
So MSE went off. I glanced at the evil thing in the hopper and tossed it. Suddenly Malware went off – three rapid hits. I realized that this wasn’t the place to be, that I was aground in the shallows and the enemy batteries were heating shot. Dropped my Firefox, dropped my internet, then ran a flash scan with Malware.
While it was finding three more things out there, I realized that MSE had taken a hit and was laying huddled on the floor. I couldn’t get it to restart. Tried and tried. Okay, this would come down to MalwareBytes. Once I got the flash scan clean, I ran the quick scan – it came up with a pair of things. Crap! So I’d clean, reboot, flash, and quick. The second time, nothing showed up. Ran the full scan and went off to read for a bit. Came back just before midnight to find that full scan had found one more thing. So either it was respawning or I was just finding new ones.
Took a chance and went back online to pull down the newest version of MSE and update Malware. Dropped the line, flashed, quick, and started the full.
Woke up this morning and found nothing. Okay. Removed the body of MSE from my system and reinstalled that. Had a bit of boot up problems – the system overclocked a few times, the fan humming, the CPU at 100%. Took a shower, came back to find it still laboring. Shut down the system and let it stay down for 20 minutes. Rebooted and it came up clean. Ran flash and quick scans on both services and came up clean. Checked the CPU – it’s running between 0% and 2%, its normal idle range.
So I think we got it. Plans going forward are to run MSE and Malware with full updates and full scans for a week and see if anything comes back up.
Oh, and I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll stay off those muzzleloader sites and keep to the porn sites where it’s safer.