[ExI] FakeAlert and Virtumonde

[Damien Broderick]

I've already whined to one list member privately about the following 
problem, and he felt my best move at this point is to sacrifice a 
goat to the old gods. It might well be.

In the last day or so, my XP PC has been infected by the Trojans 
FakeAlert and Virtumonde. I asked Adware to deal with it, please, and 
the program chugged away, finding a bunch of nasty Things, then told 
me it had run into an unhandled exception and chugged some more 
before declaring that it hadn't found anything bad. Poor stupid thing.

So I clicked on the latest Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool 
and it said it couldn't open, go away. Wtf?!

I downloaded the program everyone seems to swear by, Spyware Doctor, 
for which luckily my wife has a paid subscription for several 
computers; it studiously examined every byte of my hard drive and 
found these two Trojans, then claimed to be deleted them 
successfully. Not so. They're still there beavering away, the 
bastards. I reran all these programs, of course, but nothing good came of it.

So--leaving aside sensible demands that I throw away my machine and 
get an Apple with open source software, or the like: can any of the 
cognoscenti here suggest a simplish way for me to rid my machine of 
these filthy beasts? I read about various ways to go into the 
registry and fool with the code, but I'm too inexperienced to dare 
that. And I'm reluctant to just back up as much as possible and scrub 
the disk out with soap&water because some programs don't reliably 
restore themselves when you try that (Dragon NaturallySpeaking, for 
example, refuses to recognize all its trained lexicon).

Any hints appreciated! And apologies for clogging up the list with this drivel.

Damien Broderick





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