Thursday, January 8, 2009

Leave My Computer Alone!

I left my computer alone for a few minutes last night and came back to find a mess. It's not like I've never left it alone before. I thought I could trust it!

My brother left a comment saying he had a similar problem recently. He downloaded a program called Malwarebytes, and that took care of his problem. So, I tried it. I downloaded the free version, installed, and attempted a scan. My computer shut down before the scan could complete.

Luckily, I had recently downloaded a program called WinUtilities from Giveaway of the Day. It has a tool to manage the startup files on your computer, so I looked through those and found something called prunnet.exe. That was the culprit, as well as some kind of advertising service that had installed itself. I couldn't just delete the file because it was running, but by disabling it in the startup files and then restarting my computer, I think I kept it from starting. Then I browsed to the file (in Windows/system32) and deleted it. I also selected all other files there that had been created at the same time, and by right-clicking them, I could scan just those files with Malwarebytes. It found the bad files and removed them. I also used Add/Remove Programs to uninstall the advertising 'service' that had placed itself on my computer.

Now, I'm crossing my fingers that it all worked. So far so good - no more annoying popups. Still, I'm irritated that people do these kinds of things. Don't they have better things to do with their lives? Thank you to the creators of Malwarebytes - I'm thankful you chose to use your powers for good. The rest of you - leave my computer alone!

4 comments:

Berni said...

Thanks for the tip. I will make a note of that. So far so good on my computer. I go into quite a tail spin if anything goes wrong with my computer and everything I have ever learned seems to go out the door as well.

Anonymous said...

Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!

Anonymous said...

:(

Barb said...

I'm gonna try what you have done & hope it works. I believe I may have keylogger problem from someone I used to know. I think it was planted in my computer/or put on my computer sometime when I was gone. I actually have audios of someone typing on it....GREAT...HUH????? Anyway, my passwords have been changed, different things have come up...one time my whole computer was locked & I had to take it to a guru to get it unlocked....but NOT GURU enough evidently cuz the problem is still there. Enough said...I hope it works. :'( :-E =-O