After following cottonball's instructions, you're going to have to uninstall Norton 360. I believe that even tho' it is out of date, it's firewall is blocking Window's firewall from turning on.
Use the Norton 'uninstall tool': https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/...us?pvid=f-home
Let me make myself clear. I'm not asking you to do anything at this point. You should only be following the instructions of one member at a time in cleanup thread like this. (Well, cottonball asked you to uninstall Norton 360 and Jacee provided a link to help with that - so no conflicting instructions there.)
I saw the "Social Privacy DNS" program when you first made the post. It took me a while to locate a link to download it so the I could learn about it. The only way that I could get it was to download a file that IE warned me not to save/run. I downloaded that bad file anyway and once I said yes to the UAC warning, that bad file silently installed the Conduit search engine and several other things.
I now know a bit about these "Social Privacy" (browser plug-in) and "Social Privacy DNS" (a DNS changer) apps. I'm not suggesting that you do anything about them just yet. Please continue to follow cottonball's road map for cleaning your computer.
By the way, I installed this possible malware into a Virtual Machine. I'm not risking infecting a real computer. If you have the UAC set at the default or higher level, then the DNS changer will fail to work after one reboot. The UAC app is a good thing
While it is fine to run this tool... it is not a good idea to do anything out of sequence with cottonball's instructions. The reports that the cleanup tools generate are analyzed by cottonball and a FIXIT* file is generated. If WDO is run between the time that the FIXIT file is prepared and the time that the OP runs the FIXIT file - bad stuff can happen.
That said, bad stuff probably won't happen due ton the nature of the FIXIT file - but it could happen. Let's let cottonball and Jacee move this OP toward a clean computer and then we can have our inputs after that.
I don't want to discourage you from helping others - this is just a nudge to ask you to change the timing on when you offer that help in a cleanup thread like these.
About WDO: it is by far the simplest offline scanner to suggest to people. I've suggested many time. However, it does not have the best track record at fixing the stuff that it finds. Sometimes if will "fix" the computer in such a way that it will no longer boot because WDO barfed the MBR fix.
*FIXIT is just a generic term not meant to reflect any real file name for any real cleanup tool.
Last edited by UsernameIssues; 08 Nov 2013 at 02:09. Reason: reword stuff
Yes my security is MSE. I ran it. It found one item : Exploit:Java/CVE-2012-1723.
I will check into Windows Defender offline after work today.
Thank you!
Usernameissues- I just saw your post. Thank you. I will do as suggested.
Good morning Cottonball. I completely missed your last post somehow! I just saw it. I am on my way to work now, so I will do all you said when I get home tonight. I thank you for being so diligent in your help! I will keep you posted.
Hi Cottonball,
I put the frst & fixit file on the desktop. Then while running the frst again (scanning), this error came up:Line(file"C:users\Don's computer\frst64.exe"): Error: can not redeclare a constant.
Waiting on you to continue.
No, you didn't throw me off. I appreciate the assistance, and Cottonball did a wonderful job a couple of weeks ago on a similar issue on a work computer for my sister! He's quite an asset! I nemd it fixlist.txt as he instructed. :)
Phew...
Good.
:::back to lurking:::
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