After nearly 20 years of PC use, I got my first virus this morning - and it's a nasty one. It started out in my primary user account : as soon as I log in I get a Blue Screen and then the PC reboots. It happens so quickly I can't launch any applications. So I tried one of the other accounts on the machine. That came came up OK, but this virus/trojan has hijacked all the web browsers on the machine and redirected all Google and Yahoo search results to bogus URLs - so I couldn't do any research on the problem. Eventually, that account Blue Screened, rebooted, Blue Screened, rebooted, and so became useless too.
I found some apps, by searching the web on a different PC of mine, which claimed to be able to fix this problem; but it looks like the virus has blocked any of those apps from even launching. Mmm, insidious.
So, I'm going to try going back to a saved restore point. If that fails, I guess a Vista re-install is coming my way! Hooray!
Any ideas yet how you became infected? What virus is responsible?
looks like it’s the go.google.com redirect virus, at least. maybe there’s something else, too, since that one doesn’t seem to cause BSODs.
looks like the system restore might have done the trick though. i was able to get my account to come back enough so i can start running A/V and malware scanners.
i had also just installed Fallout3, so maybe it did something to my system…
i think i got it from the web somewhere yesterday. i remember getting a couple of strange messages from Adobe Reader saying it couldn’t open [some file].PDF, when i wasn’t anywhere near any PDFs. but i ignored it. i think i must’ve hit a JS or Acrobat exploit somewhere. i didn’t think anything of it at the time, though.