patndoris TechnoGeek

If there are pop ups telling you how many hundreds and thousands of infected files you have asking you to fork out your hard earned money to clean them - don’t fall for it!  If you hear advertisements playing even when you don’t have the internet open, if your see warnings of your hard drive failing and critical errors and low memory on a machine you know shouldn’t have those issues - chances are you are infected. 

There has been an explosion in the malware forums lately, and not in a good way.  There are a couple of new rogues and rootkits going around and they are hitting a lot of people.  They are really nasty and not so easy to fix.  One person reported the computer shop he works in had 30 clients hit this week alone. 

The Windows Recovery rogue (and others like it) has the potential to appear to remove all your desktop icons, your start menu items as well as your quick launch and taskbar items.  They are easily restored using the proper tools, but whatever you do, DO NOT use any kind of cleaning tool that will empty your temp files or you will be in a world of hurt.  Even System Restore won’t help you if those temp files get emptied. The best thing to do is post in a malware forum and get technical assistance on this one.

The other is a really nasty piece of work that modifies one or more of your critical system files.  Right now, until our malware tools can catch up to it, it takes a bit of work to get rid of this little gem of a rootkit. Again, don’t tackle this one on your own - as for assistance in a forum (at least until anti-virus scanners and other reputable cleaning tools get a fix in place).

Your best defense right now is to be very careful what you click. Only download files from trusted sources. Stay away from P2P file sharing sites too.  Practice safe surfing even more diligently than normal right now!