Trojans, Part Deux

I was supposed to title this entry “anti-malware and registry hunting,” but perhaps I should just call it: “Ate My Lunch. All of it.”

After running gmer, malwarebytes and Symantec in both Safe Mode and fully booted OS, I felt hopeful. All three products had found different things and cleaned them out in the course of 12 reboots. (At least)

But no.

My apps started acting a little odd, so I remained watchful. Then IE couldn’t connect anymore, even though Firefox was working fine. When I ran a diagnostic, I discovered that IE was trying to connect to Hotmail. Oops.

I gave up. Off to the IT guys for a re-format. They tell me it happens about once a week.

I did manage to capture some .dll files, just out of curiosity. I can look at them in VMWare to see what I can find out – if anything. But I do note that the version I “acquired” was much more virulent than the references I saw on the web. More trojans installed, more registry entries, and attempts to send off email/spam.

Lesson learned – just reformat.