Tuesday 27 November 2012

What is this blog for?

Before you click the back button on your browser, just hold on a moment and read this. It might be what you're looking for.

There are some computer viruses that are so unique, so new that even a google search cannot help you to get rid of it. In the past I have had a few localized entirely within my own computer and no record of them anywhere on the internet. It was down to me to save all my files and get rid of a virus that just did not want to go away. I've considered posting on tech help forums, but I wasn't optimistic that anyone else would know what to do either.

The Beginnings of VIRUSUNKNOWN

So what if your antivirus picks it up in a scan? You can move it to the chest and leave it to languish, thinking it is in a safe place. There was a particulary nasty virus which almost destroyed my new laptop just by doing this.

This virus was called Leshi.dll, and it sat in the registry of the main Windows\CurrentVersion\Run folder. So it was already highly suspicious when I found it with Avast. I moved it to chest, and it's important to note that at this time I was getting browser redirects, a very difficult problem to get rid of, usually caused by a virus infecting everything related to the internet. At first it was targeting main sites like Google, Youtube and Amazon. Eventually I couldn't even load my own homepage without pasting the whole URL, or I would get sent to CanadianPharmacy or a similar malicious marketing website. I've had plenty of redirect viruses but this beast would not even stop after multiple browser deletions and complete reinstalls.

I was sure I was safe since I had HijackThis, and I could even see the leshi.dll in the scan. It allowed me to remove it from the registry, and I restarted the computer to make sure it was working. To my horror, the registry had replaced itself. Leshi.dll was back and even more offensive. My laptop was now freezing up frequently and it had also killed my Firewall and blocked Avast from working. I was even blocked from downloading other antiviruses because the page would always redirect. Both Internet Explorer and my preferred Firefox had this problem, so there was no way around it. I was worried that next time I shut it down, it would not turn back on. After trying every tool it would allow me to, I finally decided to roll the computer back to before the virus appeared. That was over a week past and I would lose a lot of data, but it could possibly remove everything that had happened and restore my browser and firewall.