Ok...long story short...
an aquaintance sent me an email (turned out it was bugged).
I, being the nonce that I am opened said email and result...a plague upon my house (well my machine and I think I am now infected also hehe).
I have run all the diagnostics and fixes that were recommended by you brilliant guys and girls here...followed Howard's cure all and found many many other bugs on my machine and cleaned them out.
However...the bast...beastlies that created this email in the first place were rather clever. My notification area of my winXP task bar keeps flashing 'virus alerts', 'urgent sustem message:virus!' etc etc and these alerts, when you click on them take you to a host of, antimalware type operations who would want you to buy their product which they have maliciously installed on my machine in the first place. Now I have so much anti spyware stuff installed now I wonder where it will end. However I can't shake these adverts.
My IE and now firefox has been hijacked also by the same crowd (I suspect) and they have prevented me from changing my homepage from one of their choosing. I cannot change the setting in IE - it appears that I have but upon restarting the same page always appears under 'about:blank' but the homepage is www.securityuptodate.com
I can post my HJ log but I pretty much removed anything that moved.
If anyone can help - many thanks.
I should add that initially the virus alerts said I was infected with that W32myzorFKyf.html virus now it says I have internet trojan iworm_attck_v122.02a.
I downloaded firefox and made sure not to import any info from IE into it because I didn't want to run the risk of the virus/worm getting into it but sure enough it was also infected.
Lastly I changed the settings in my task bar manager to hide all alerts but still this hasn't worked. The constantly flashing alert is still there encouraging me to buy some product to get rid of the most likely the very worm that they planted in the first place. brilliant marketing strategy as I am almost at my wits end and ready to fork out the $$ just in the vain hope their ad campaign claims are slightly more honest than their trojan horse marketing ploy.
an aquaintance sent me an email (turned out it was bugged).
I, being the nonce that I am opened said email and result...a plague upon my house (well my machine and I think I am now infected also hehe).
I have run all the diagnostics and fixes that were recommended by you brilliant guys and girls here...followed Howard's cure all and found many many other bugs on my machine and cleaned them out.
However...the bast...beastlies that created this email in the first place were rather clever. My notification area of my winXP task bar keeps flashing 'virus alerts', 'urgent sustem message:virus!' etc etc and these alerts, when you click on them take you to a host of, antimalware type operations who would want you to buy their product which they have maliciously installed on my machine in the first place. Now I have so much anti spyware stuff installed now I wonder where it will end. However I can't shake these adverts.
My IE and now firefox has been hijacked also by the same crowd (I suspect) and they have prevented me from changing my homepage from one of their choosing. I cannot change the setting in IE - it appears that I have but upon restarting the same page always appears under 'about:blank' but the homepage is www.securityuptodate.com
I can post my HJ log but I pretty much removed anything that moved.
If anyone can help - many thanks.
I should add that initially the virus alerts said I was infected with that W32myzorFKyf.html virus now it says I have internet trojan iworm_attck_v122.02a.
I downloaded firefox and made sure not to import any info from IE into it because I didn't want to run the risk of the virus/worm getting into it but sure enough it was also infected.
Lastly I changed the settings in my task bar manager to hide all alerts but still this hasn't worked. The constantly flashing alert is still there encouraging me to buy some product to get rid of the most likely the very worm that they planted in the first place. brilliant marketing strategy as I am almost at my wits end and ready to fork out the $$ just in the vain hope their ad campaign claims are slightly more honest than their trojan horse marketing ploy.