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Security Issue

Yimbo
Resolved

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Posted May 17, 2011 at 1:42PM

An icon has appeared on the right hand side of the bottom tray, purporting to be "XP security alert", with various "pop-up" warnings of all sorts of infections presently on my computer. It listed about 15 or so! I'm asked to "register", which takes me to a page which a yellow band at the top of the screen warns me "this site is unsafe". I've closed it, but the alerts keep popping up. It all looks a genuine Microsoft series of warnings - but something tells me that it isn't.

I ran a scan with my Zone Alarm suite, which detected 6 problems, two of which would only be removed on reboot, which I did. Now I find that my ZA suite will not run on start-up, and it, and all my other programs, instead of opening up normally, take me to a box asking me to "choose the program you want to use to open this file".

It feels as though my computer has been (or worse, is) under some kind of attack, and with no security suite running, it's very exposed.

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

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Nontek

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Posted May 17, 2011 at 1:51PM

Try and do a restart in Safe Mode With Networking. Then run a full scan with link text

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muddypaws

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Posted May 17, 2011 at 1:51PM

Yimbo A lot of it going about. See link text

It got everywhere and took the IT man 4 hours to clear the PC. Hopefully yours isn't so severe.

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Terry Brown

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Posted May 17, 2011 at 1:52PM

can you use restore to get back to a time before te infection- YES it sounds like a Trogan or Virus.

Ytr another anti-virus program like Avast http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download to see if that shifts it,or redownload the lastest version of AVG http://free.avg.com/gb-en/homepage

If it does, then clear all your rsstore points as it may be hiding in there.

Terry

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Nontek

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Posted May 17, 2011 at 1:54PM

For further info ....

link text

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Yimbo

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Posted May 17, 2011 at 2:54PM

Thanks folks - - I managed to run System Restore in safe mode, which I wasn't expecting to be successful - but it was. I then ran through Malwaresbytes and Zone Alarm with no adverse reports! All seems well!

Having read through the other threads on this issue, and the huge problems caused by this rogue program - I feel that I've been very lucky to have got off the hook so easily and quickly.

Why hasn't Microsoft issued a fix for this issue? Or maybe it has, and I've just missed it!

Anyhow, once again, I'm in you good folks' debt! Thanks!

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