DescentBB

A few days ago my computer started acting crazy and finally Wednesday it went belly up. Wouldn't boot, no boot device detected.

I used my Ultimate Boot CD to run some hard drive diags and found that the free space on my drive was being misrepresented. Any way I fixed that problem and viola, my drive would indeed boot again. However I still suspected that something was sneaking in under the radar upon boot, so I tried to run Malwarebytes Anti-malware and instantly it errored out.

Anyway to make a long story short, I had to boot into safe mode with networking, download MBAM again update it and run it. It found 2 instances of a generic downloader.trojan in my windows\\tasks folder. That bugger had been in there no telling how long and once it was gone, man, my computer runs like the OS was just installed. I've got quite a few programs installed on here and the first thing I noticed after finding and deleting the trojans was that the start menu worked instantly for any and all the many subfolders in there.

Don't know where I picked them up or why my AV didn't find these, and don't know exactly what tasks they were doing, but just thought I'd let you all know it's out there.

What were you using for AV?

Actually I'd say it is possible or even likely the drive/file system errors were unrelated to the trojans if they were running at all. That kind of disk error can be caused by a power outage while the computer is running or some application bluescreening or any other kind of improper shutdown/crash. Anything that can keep windows from properly flushing the disk cache can cause file system errors like that and they typically aren't serious.

As for the AV program not catching them; they don't work that way, especially if the trojans exploited your internet browser or one of its plugins.

Funny how people do not use any malware programs until it is too late..

every 2 weeks update and short scan. find a positive run a full scan...

There goes 6 minutes of your life

You know you can have most AV and Malware programs to scan on their own right. Comes in handy while you sleep.

Don't use Internet Explorer, stay away from naughty websites, run Firefox with adblock and noscript. Best virus prevention out there short of running Linux.

LOL!