Author Topic: Computer problem= Help Requested.  (Read 26554 times)

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Offline dracnal

  • Posts: 1698
Re: Computer problem= Help Requested.
« Reply #550: September 14, 2020, 03:19:18 PM »
If I were you'd I'd be changing passwords for any sensitive accounts. Most of those trojans were probably just 'aggressive' advertising, but maybe not all.

MBAM is usually pretty good about differentiating malicious from shady advertising. That said, yep - any passwords you have stand a REALLY good chance of being compromised. I would change email password first as most things you submit a password change request to will send you mail asking you to click a link. In the relatively unlikely chance that someone is camping in your mail account while you change things, it's just a big extra headache.  I would also -seriously- consider turning on two factor authentication for your email, at least for a few months. I know it's kind of a hassle, but the odds that whoever got your password also cloned your cell phone are very very slim.

That really is an insane number of things tagged as malicious. I'm guessing that a lot of it was multiple hits for the same item - registry changes, file associations, etc. - but that's still definitely an ugly number. I wasn't going to suggest this as a first step but it's worth running a rootkit scan. In English, a rootkit is a way for folks to access your computer that tends to be harder to notice and bypasses any actively running security measure.

This is a link to the Kaspersky scanner, TDSSKiller. The catch is that Kaspersky is a Russian company and the NSA is NOT a fan of theirs, due to potential links to the government and no guarantee they aren't helping state hackers access your system while killing non-government programs. Normally, in a case like yours, I would get a new hard drive and start from scratch, but that's because I'm typically working on business owned computers, where a replacement hard drive and my time spent is absolutely worth it compared to the risk of a compromised machine.

If anyone has a free alternative to Kaspersky that's effective, please feel free to post.

With all that said, https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/tdsskiller/ will get you a clean copy of the program rather than a shady link or advert site. For convenience, and because bleepingcomputer is reputable, just get the .exe version. Same drill - install it, run it, reboot when it asks you to, wait for it to finish and note any results it may have found. If it does find anything, it's worth running it again until it comes up clean. Once that's done, run MBAM again. Might be overkill, but leaving a drive in play with that many infected hits is enough to make me more paranoid.