Pop-up/defrag virus?

[Marilee]

My son just called and told me that a friend's computer is stalling due to
too many pop-ups. (I know--use a pop-up blocker.) At the same time,
though, the friend is unable to run disk defrag.

I thought I'd read something about pop-ups being caused by malicious html
code, but now I can't find it.

Is this a problem others have encountered and have a solution for? (Or at
least simpler than a reformat?)

Marilee

 

[David W. Hodgins]

My son just called and told me that a friend's computer is stalling due to
too many pop-ups. (I know--use a pop-up blocker.) At the same time,
though, the friend is unable to run disk defrag.

There are three types of popups.

Popups that are displayed when you are browsing the web. Those can be
blocked by most broswers, except Internet explorer. My preference is
opera, but you will find many here who prefer the mozilla based browers.

There are popups displayed by the windows mesenger service. See
http://grc.com/stm/shootthemessenger.htm for info, and a utility
to disable the service.

There are popups displayed by "adware", installed on the pc.
See http://www.spywareinfo.com/downloads.php?cat=sp#det
for download links. I suggest running both Adaware and Spybot
Search & Destroy. For both of those, be sure to download the latest
updates, after you install, but before you run the scans.

BTW, a format/reinstall (assuming XP) will leave the machine
wide open to malware infection, unless you follow the procedures in
http://isc.sans.org/presentations/xpsurvivalguide.pdf

He should also run a full virus scan. See
http://www.claymania.com/panic.html for general info, and links
to various AV scanners.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

 

[k35454]

My son just called and told me that a friend's computer is stalling due to
too many pop-ups. (I know--use a pop-up blocker.) At the same time,
though, the friend is unable to run disk defrag.

I thought I'd read something about pop-ups being caused by malicious html
code, but now I can't find it.

Is this a problem others have encountered and have a solution for? (Or at
least simpler than a reformat?)

Marilee

Has he tried defrag in Safe Mode, after running Scandisk ?
k35454.