Sunday, August 12, 2012

Mal Ware that attacked today.....

I don't have much to report for today, as I was again spell bound by the computers.....  My Mint project was all encompassing until I did something wrong and corrupted the boot record on the hard drive....

I had put the software on there the first time as a test, and I got everything working just like I wanted it as a test......  but it was in a small partition.....  So I blew that all away and reformated the hard drive to put it on for real this time....

And I worked a long time and just about had it when I added one more program, that corrupted the whole deal............

So tonight I started over from the blank hard drive......  But, Hey I'm really experienced at solving these little problems as they come up.....

In the process of all of this, I had a trojan attack the start up of my browser on the windows machine....  I use Chrome by Google, but a little internet research availed that this trojan can attack IE or Firefox or Chrome, it doesn't care....  Its called incredibar, and mystart....  Nasty business....

What it does is embed itself into your browser and come up as your startup search engine when you start  up the browser... You have to close these tabs to get to your real page, and your old home page is just gone...  The incredibar will add a search bar across your browser to search the internet for things you want...  Of course, the signon when you click on one of the adds credits mystart as the referring web page.... and they get paid if you buy anything, or even for the clicks like google....

I managed to get this out of my lookup page on chrome by clicking, the wrench, settings, startup, open a specific page.  At the end of that line is a set pages that is clickable and if you hover over the mystart, an X appears that will delete it.  But some research on the internet says that I need an additional malware product to identify all of the instances on my hard drive and eliminate it...   Most of the security packages  like Norton and AVG haven't programmed their systems to stop it yet...

If it jumped on my computer, its only a matter of time and it will be headed your way too.  I guess it piggy backs on downloads that you might be doing, and since that was primarily my whole day, I managed to increase my exposure a lot......

Google Mystart, and or Incredibar...

Retired Rod

I have Spy Bot running as I am writing this!!

5 comments:

  1. I hate to hear of that happening, and hope you can get it all cleaned off your computer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, (knock on wood) my Kaspersky seems to be working so far. Once in a while I get a warning that "somethin' ain't raight", to put in a Southern vernacular.
    This is usually when I'm looking for media files.
    I just move on.
    I found that Norton was always behind when it came to their updates. I'm not swift enough to stay ahead of the guys who are supposed to be staying ahead, so I went with Kaspersky.
    Good luck.

    ReplyDelete
  3. WE use Kaspersky also and so far so good. Norton failed me and we moved on to Kaspersky.

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's a nasty one alright. Glad you were able to get it straightened out.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Rod, I hope I never have anything like that happen to me, as I wouldn't know what to do, and would have to ask Rick for help. I have had viruses on other computers, and managed to overcome them, but I haven't had any since I have been using Microsoft Security Essentials.
    It is great that you knew what you were doing! I have Malwarebytes, but maybe I had better run SpyBot too.

    How about some pictures of Biscuit? We haven't seen her for a while, she must be all 'growed up' by now?
    Happy Tails, and Trails, Penny, TX

    ReplyDelete

Anonymous comments had to be eliminated.... For the most part this has removed unwanted responses.. If you can't post your comments, please email me and we will make other arrangements...