I edited Darik's out of my OP (use DISKPART) because optical drive media can be compromised in these situations: use a Win7 DVD copy made on another machine, scan or discard after reinstall.
Boot scan upon reinstall with Avast free home, Spybot in Safe Mode, Win7 DVD first.
The retrieved data DVD's will be a corruption path into any OS.
I'm in safe mode now, scanning with malware bytes, I already found that Display. HiJacker that is displayed in the 3rd image attachment.
Thus your problem now. As long as you continue to use cracks and keygens you'll run into the problems you have now.
I won't play holier than thou, we all used these things but those days have passed and the world is too dangerous to play with computer security.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from cracked software. Sometimes the guys providing those cracks are a lot smarter then we think.
Just my two cents.
Good luck with your repairs.
Thanks,
I scanned in safe mode with SpyBot S&D and Malware Bytes and it is all clean, I'm gonna start the recovery and after that I'll scan again.
EDIT: After spybot s&d and malware bytes scanned and cleaned everything after restart, Lavasoft Ad-Aware found two XXX.Hack.XXC Bot something, deleted as well. I have a little farm here :))
Run another AV, need second opinion.
In the future, anything you download from a torrent needs to be extracted and rightclick scanned with AV and Spybot before running.
It's ok, now lavasoft Ad-Aware reports everything to be clean. Imma start digging.... let's see what surprises do I stumble upon :))
It's freaky, with the system freshly installed, I had by default those 3 malwares. I didn't installed anything besides those anti malware and firefox and sync'ed my bookmarks. Need a low level format.
Yeah,, well I always say there are ,.,....
Those who have lost data, and those who will lose data.
If your data is important,, then you should have already had a backup / disaster recovery plan.
Please research Disater Recovery, or Basic Back up planning and create one.
Last edited by Tepid; 14 Dec 2009 at 22:01.
Run SUPERAntiSpyware as well (the free version). Combined with Malwarebytes, this will identify pretty much every virus/trojan/bug out there.
Good luck!
So, everything nice and dandy until 10 minutes ago, out of nowhere virtualgirlhd.exe appeared in my downloads folder and it was already installed when I checked.
I have antivirus, realtime protection from LavaSoft Ad-Aware, checked with Malware Bytes and nothing found. Now I am checking with spyBot S&D in safe mode,
in conclusion, the program installed itself automatically with UAC turned to paranoid and all those softwares protecting my PC, how the hell is that possible, and I wasn't afk at all, I am recovering data and scanning as I recover it, this is to freaky!
vghd.exe appears already in control panel, in the registries, deleted it from everywhere, waiting for another hit.
Ideas? THANKS!!!
A few excellent lessons are to be learned by this situation and should be noted by other users.
a.) UAC in Windows 7 is GOOD and should always stay enabled.
b.) Using cracked software is not only a security risk but it's piracy. You get what you pay for.
c.) Always, always, ALWAYS have a Backup Plan in place. Whether you burn your data to DVD, have a backup HDD, online storage, etc. This is probably the single most important best practice that many PC users still neglect until it's too late.
Last edited by BugOutMachine; 18 Dec 2009 at 12:23. Reason: removed RAID configuration due to fact that it is not a viable backup option in any configuration
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