Tinkering
File this under “things you never expect your friendly neighbourhood historian to be able to do.” For the second time in two months, I’ve had to wrestle a would-be infection from taking hold in a household PC. (Mac-lovers, please park your “You should have a Mac” comments right there as that won’t happen until all Windows/Linux and FreeBSD machines disappear from the face of the earth.)
The infection came via a web advertisement in a up-to-date Firefox browser (friends don’t let friends browse in IE — Firefox, Opera and Chrome are all a bit more robust). Even with Adblock Plus installed, it still managed to work its way in (I believe via an interstitial advertisement which requires you to click on the screen in order to proceed to the content). Fortunately, eldest saw something was wrong and immediately handed the computer over to me. Three hours later and I had matters cleared up.
It wasn’t an easy task and I count myself as fairly computer savvy. I am comfortable with editing my own registry, for instance (vital in this case as one of the tricks of this malware was disabling the launching of most executables which includes the best tools in malware removal such as getting updates for Spybot or Malwarebyte’s tools). Heaven help those who aren’t as this infection required an awful lot of tinkering under the hood.
In the end, I’ve got NoScript up and running now on her PC and will be setting it up on everyone else’s as I’m hearing reports of ad servers on a number of popular mainstream destination sites serving up some of these malware ads (note that it isn’t the site itself, but their ad servers and, even then, most of the advertising companies are horrified to hear that they’re serving up malware). I also have Flashblock running and have for a long time as those annoying auto-start flash items always bugged me.
I’ll also give a shout-out to the fine folks at Bleeping Computer whose malware removal tutorials and forums are second to none. But I’d rather not have spent my Saturday doing this. Now, pardon me but I have to troubleshoot some issues youngest’s having with her favourite online game. Is it DX, the game files or something else? I’ll let you know tomorrow!
