The other evening I was surfing Railpicturs.net and called up a video of the Ringling Bros. Circus train on the FEC…in addition to the video I seemed to have picked up a trespasser on the right of way…a piece of Malware that entered through the Java connection and appears to have identified itself as ‘Microsoft Antimalware’.
Upon entering my desktop system it put up a screen stating that there was Malware on the system and only the product that began and displayed a ‘scan dialogue’ on the screen could cure it.
I immediately shut the box down and began running the known anit-virus, anti-malware products that reside on my box…they identified and removed a number of items, however, there was one item that it would not remove…it was identified as
TrojanDownloader:Java/OpenConnection.gc
The box is now at a professional comupter service to have this rectified.
I have been experiencing a number of unrequested advertising pages from RailPictures.net when attempting to call up the full size pictures of my choosing.
I don’t know if anyone else is experiencing similar things.
You’d better forward a copy of this message to the staff there-they may not know about it yet and would like to find out. Maybe they can research things better and find out where the offending ads are coming from.
I believe I have, but since my anti-virus software identified, isolated, and suppressed it, it wasn’t enough of a problem for me to take the trouble to write down the details of the name, etc. It wasn’t much worse than suppressing the pop-ups, anyway.
Same thing has happened to me on some of the pages at the otherwise very useful www.multimodalways.com website - I recognize the pattern of that bogus malware warning screen and cure, etc. Too bad somebody can’t “terminate with extreme prejudice” the originators of these problems - permanently ! [xx(]
FWIW: Sometimes these malware programs are coded such that even clicking on the “X” to close the applet window will cause the unwanted program to launch. DO NOT “X” OUT OF THE PROGRAM!
Your best bet when you get a malware program is to do “Control-Alt-Delete”, and from the task manager restart the entire PC. If the malware is preventing access to the task manager, then use the power button to turn off the PC (yes, even with programs running); although it is not good to do this on a regular basis, it is a far better alternative than risking giving the malware an opportunity to self-install.
If, after holding the power button in for 5 seconds the PC does not stud down, then go drastic and pull the plug. REPEAT: DO NOT “X” OUT OF A MALWARE APPLET!!!
I agree with Zardoz. It happened to me about a year ago and I ended up having to have everything erased, including the operating system. I was told by the technician to always just shut down immediately when these things pop up. Hitting the X-box or taking some other action actually launches it in a lot of cases.
I just want to echo that this is absolutely 100% perfect advice. I infected a computer once, not that long ago, by actually clicking on the “X.”
Realizing how stupid I was (and paying to get the computer cleaned), I told the whole family these instructions. Wherver the malware was coming from, it tried to attack two other computers in the house. I both cases, by powering down immediately, we kept the malware from launching.
I run a program called MalWare Bytes which is free (google it) and pretty easy to use. I also keep a backup copy of that program on a flash drive as some of the mw I’ve seen disables anything on the system when it arrives.
I have had good experiences with shutting down, restarting and running in “safe mode” and running the MalWare Bytes from there. It’s caught infections that were launched and removed their tracking cookies too…but I’m comfortable taking that (and registry editing too) steps.
I also have MalWareBytes loaded on my machine and ran it…it removed some stuff but not the ‘real offender’,
The computer tech that is working on the machine said he had not yet heard of the problem I was relating and he has worked on this box before with great success.
I also have MalWareBytes. It was loaded on my computer by a tech support agent at Microsoft while he was troubleshooting a windows problem by remote control. The problem was not a virus, but I decided that if Microsoft uses the program it must be pretty effective.
I was looking for some prototype photos of particular locomotives (SDCAT & a special CNW Dash 9 - 8730) for modeling purposes and ended up finding lots of pictures of Athearn, Bachmann & Kato locomotives. After 15 locomotives I clicked on were all models and with the amount of pop-ups & flash ads I stopped using the site. LocoPhotos or Flickr are what I use now.
Whenever I have encountered that dreaded self-initiating malware detection pop-up that immediately begins to list all the bad bogeymen on my hard drive, I just back-screen out and it goes away.
One time I found that I had a Trojan or virus called Spyaxe, and I couldn’t get rid of it with Norton or anything else. Not knowing better, I decided I had nothing to lose by trying a system restore to a previous set-point. By that I mean I had never used it before, and didn’t really know what I was about to ask the computer to do (this was years ago…). When the computer restarted a few minutes later, it was free of the SpyAxe.
Ever since that time, whenever I encounter a bug of any kind, something that makes me go “Hmmm…” because the computer seems to have modified its behaviour in an unwanted or prohibitive way, I just do a system restore. Takes about five minutes all up, and it has always cured my woes. Did it just five days ago.
And I agree, railpictures.net is an annoying site for that reason. It has a lot of fantastic imagery, though.
MalwareBytes has a good reputation, and I used Superantispyware until just recently when I purchased a new PC. AVG freeware and SuperAntiSpyware both worked very well.
No way. I doubt that is true. I have never EVER seen a model photo on railpictures.net. They would never allow one. Maybe your thinking of rrpicturearchives.net.
[banghead]Some pretty accurate and interesting advice here. I enjoy reading a lot of different sites, and in the past I have developed some pretty ‘ugly’ issues, as well as some vicious infections to my machines (boxes?)[banghead] some that have been fatal and some that were extracted- expensively![oops].
Fortunately, I have a grandson that is pretty computer literate. His thoughts about dealing with malware problems have revolved around several free systems to attack malware problems. He’s installed ‘Malware Bytes’, ‘Ad Aware’, ‘Threatfire’, Avast Free Virus protection’. The theory being that malware gremlins use diferent strategies to infect systems, and one system may get it, or might overlook the infector. Therefore by running several different protectors, your chances of stopping the malware are better. So far it has worked pretty well.
One thing to hold onto and protect is the Original Systems Installation Disk for your maching. If you wind up having to ‘scrub’ your hard drive to dump an infection, you can reinstall youtr original system. To buy a new disk for a Windows Operating System, can be devilishly expensive and possibly hard to find. That original operating system disk is worth its weight in gold.[2c]
I’ve run Win2K and XP for over ten years and have NEVER had a malware infection. Lucky, maybe. Cautious, definitely! Some tips not mentioned above:
use a hardware firewall if you have a high speed internet connection. Software firewalls mainly belong on laptops and those systems forced to use dial up access. Test your firewall using GRC’s Shields Up service.
use Firefox as your primary web browser. The Noscript and Adblock add-ons are updated frequently and add great protection against evolving malware threats. Never, ever use IE6 or older for web surfing!!
consider using a Linux distribution instead of Windoze, especially if your computer needs are basic - web surfing and email (recommend Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE). For sensitive applications like online banking, use the distro in ‘live’ mode which runs directly from CD and doesn’t need to touch your hard drive. Computer geeks can install Linux dual boot or in a virtualenvironment.
turn off Autorun! This Windows ‘feature’ deserves several threads alone on computer forums. The idea that Windows will try to run anything inserted into your DVD drive or USB port is insane.