Joined: 02 Jun 2006 Posts: 5 Location: Palm Springs, CA
Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 8:45 pm Post subject: UPS email locks-out user
My daughter clicked on an email supposedly from UPS (since she had a package coming), it turned out to be a virus/worm/trojan, it messed her machine up.
She's running XP home, sp2.
She tells me she ran Kaspersky and it found a bunch of stuff but before it could finish, the machine shut down.
She rebooted and discovered she couldn't get in to the machine, so called me over to have a look.
When you try to boot the system it goes to a normal log in screen, user clicks their icon (no password required on this machine), screen flashes and then returns to the original (same) log-in screen.
Trying start in safe mode does the same thing, it goes right back to the safe-mode start screen whether you select 'safe mode', 'safe mode with networking' or 'safe mode command prompt', no chance to get to safe-mode or a command prompt, can't get into the system.
Looks to me like it's gonna take a new system drive and just use the old drive for a data drive (after clean-up).
Kaspersky has a free boot cd that you can run, update and clean your system. It comes down as an .iso which you burn to a disc.
The updates take quite a bit of time (maybe 30 minutes or so). The scan takes many hours, so run it overnight. It takes care of the normal trojans and rootkits.
F-secure and Dr. WebCure it also have bootables. We use these when a system won't boot. Personally, I always clone the HD before doing heavy duty malware cleaning.
Joined: 02 Jun 2006 Posts: 5 Location: Palm Springs, CA
Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 6:10 pm Post subject:
Thanks, packrat.
I was gonna boot from a cd and fix the registry entry that causes this but my daughter was paranoid about other malware that might be on the drive so just wanted me to re-drive the machine, which is what I did.
Sometimes it's just easier to go with the flow than argue.
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