[pchelpers] Re: Hard Drive Readability

I kept having problems with my internet connection, sometimes it did not work, 
and sometimes the modem did not seem to work. The man from the cable company 
said  that 3 people had connected there cables to my internet connection, and 
he thought that could account for part of my problems. 
  I also noticed one day the icon for one of my drives had changed, but I 
thought my daughter had done that. I also found some kind of a data bank in my 
control panel, but it did not let me see what it was because it was protected 
by a password. When I noticed my files on the C drive not accessable anymore. I 
ran four different virus scanners, which all just found little items. I also 
saw in the security log of the firewall that the same item kept coming back, 
and it was sometimes allowed and sometimes blocked. When I traced it back it 
was from some place in China. 
  I than tried to scan my system with housecall but it did not work, finally 
housecall Europe worked, but it said it would take 12 hours. When I came back 
in to the room an hour later, housecall was turned off. By that time my browser 
was also hijacked and so I decided to just re-install Windows. Yes, I had 
reformatted the drive, just to be sure. Thank you for your good advice. 
  Trudy 
   
   
   
  
Scott McNay <wizard@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
  
Hi Trudy,
Apparently-empty folders have the same cause -- you don't have
permission to look inside the folder.

You should be careful; merely reinstalling Windows without
reformatting the drive (if that is what you're doing) will not
necessarily get rid of all of the "contamination". Some malware fetch
and install other malware, so even if you detect and remove the
original virus, you may still have malicious files on the system. Or,
your security settings may have been adjusted so that your system is
more "open" to infection, often in ways which are not easy to detect.

Many large corporations require that infected systems be wiped
completely, often including the data, in order to avoid reinfection.
One of my co-workers usually does the same (but saving data);
installing fresh tends to be faster when cleaning a badly infected
system (and about break-even for a moderately-infected system), and
the system no longer has the typical dead-wood (including junk
installed by the vendor) that slows it down, and most of the software
is up-to-date, often with the security adjusted to discourage
reinfection, plus, of course, there are definitely no contaminated
files to return and haunt you. Ekhart is another person who is moving
towards reinstalling instead of cleaning.

Do you know what virus it was that caused your problem?

-- 
Scott.



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