Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Computer viruses

Wanted to share this with the rest of you all. Maybe it will keep you out of the mess I just got out of. I noticed about 5-6 days ago that when clicking on links at trusted web sites that I would be directed to some random advertisers web-site. I have several anti-virus programs including AVG, spybot, Defender and none of them detected a problem. I knew though that there must be some kind of a malware or spyware infection. Called a computer guy who works for small companies and he did a remote check and found nothing. Took my computer to him and he removed the hard drive & checked it out in another machine. He noticed a new patch on the hard drive's driver and when that file was scanned by 40 different anti-virus programs only the new FREE Microsoft Security Essentials flagged it as suspicious. It turned out to be a Win32/Alureon.F virus. You can Google it to see what bad things it does. The computer guy said that the anti-virus programs are always behind these hackers. He suggested that I run my OS as a user and not as an Administrator to help minimize what a virus can infect. Hope this helps...du

It's a never ending battle to keep them out of our computers. I was told that mucis downloads are the most common way to get a bug of some kind, but just about any website can hit you regardless of how safe it's been in the past.

The last time I had a problem, none of the programs that I had found it. I did a search to see what else was out there and read allot of good reveiws of PC Tools SpywarDoctor. I bougth it, installed it and had is scan my system. It took hours, but when it was done, it found hundreds of problems. It rates them from mild to dangerous. I had one that was really bad, two that were pretty bad, and the rest were all mild. Before buying this program, the four that I had didn't show a thing. AVG and Spybot were two of them, but I'm drawing a blank on the others. I gave up on Norton and McCafee years ago.

My wife ran it on her laptop with similar results, even though she didn't have a noticable problem. Both of us feel that our systems are faster since installing SpywareDoctor and deleting all the other programs that we had.

I had tried Microsoft a few years ago with poor results. I'm glad to hear that they are back in the game.

Eddie