Hi, I just recently (last night) suddenly got an influx of all kinds of viruses. I ran spybot and adaware, they came up with some stuff, but it didn't help me. My desktop has been changed to a red quarantine symbol, and a message that says "Your Privacy is in Danger! Download Privacy Detection Software Now!" (It is actually a link that I haven't clicked on yet.) I also get a message that looks similar to a windows alert, which states "Windows Security Alert: Windows has detected an Internet attack attempt..." and if I click OK, it brings me to a spam site, and if I exit out, it brings me to the site, and even when I manually close it through task manager, it brings up the site. This happens frequently. There are numerous other popups that are along the same lines, but those two are the worst. Here is my log that I think I'm supposed to post:

PLEASE HELP ME!

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

Your system is infected with a variety of malware.

Very Important: Before deciding whether you should clean or reformat your system, go and read this thread HERE and decide what it is you want to do.

If after reading the above, you wish to clean your system, do the following.

Go and read the Viruses/Spyware/Malware, preliminary removal instructions. Follow all the instructions exactly.

Post fresh HJT, AVG Antispyware and Combofix logs as attachments into this thread, only after doing the above.

Also, let me know the results of the AVG Antirootkit scan.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

This thread is for the use of Sigma 329 only. Please don`t post your own virus/spyware problems in this thread. Instead, open a new thread in our security and the web forum.

Although I do not put personal info on my computer, it has become so cluttered with useless stuff I believe it might be a better option to simply save some important things on a disc and reformat. Are there any good guides to doing a safe reformat?

Yes and as if by magic lol.

You need to do the following.

Diconnect from the net and don`t reconnect, until you have your firewall software installed.

1 Restart your computer and go to setup usually by pressing the F2 or delete key.

2 Once you get into setup look for the boot menu and make sure you set it to boot from cd first followed by your hard drive.

3 Put the Windows xp disk into your cd drive.

4 Now save your settings and exit setup.

5 While your computer is booting you will see a message that says "press any key to boot from cd" press any key.

6 When the welcome to setup screen appears press enter and then press F8 to accept the Microsoft licence agreement.

7 You will be prompted to repair an installation press the escape key.

8 Now select the partition that you want to reformat and press the D key to delete it you will be asked to confirm that you want to delete the partition.

9 Now press C to create a brand new partition you will be asked what size you want the partition to be in mega bytes. If you just press enter then the partition will be the maximum size that you can have. This is perfectly ok if you don`t want to create multiple partitions.

10 You will now be asked to format the partition select the ntfs file sytem and do a full format.

11 Once the format is complete setup will continue.

Your computer will restart during the remaining setup again you will be asked to press any key to boot from cd DO NOT PRESS ANYTHING and setup will continue. Once the setup is complete and you are back in Windows remove the Windows cd from your cd drive.

Install your firewall software and reconnect to the net. Install whatever drivers you need, then run Windows updates.

Finally, install whatever programmes/software you want.

Regards Howard

This thread is for the use of Sigma 329 only. Please don`t post your own virus/spyware problems in this thread. Instead, open a new thread in our security and the web forum.

Just out of curiosity, what does that mean? Do I select a specific drive that I want to reformat or something?

You delete the partition. This removes all the info from the partition and leaves it blank.

Then, you need to create a new partition(because you`ve just deleted the old one), ready to install a fresh copy of Windows.

Normally, the drive you install Windows on is your main hard drive. This is usually your C drive.

Regards Howard

This thread is for the use of Sigma 329 only. Please don`t post your own virus/spyware problems in this thread. Instead, open a new thread in our security and the web forum.