Vista Security Center: Fuck off.

[Loyal]

Thanks, guys. Issue resolved. I hope.

[Green Spanner]

Originally Posted by Loyal

Thanks, guys. Issue resolved. I hope.

Don't let your guard down.

Even after I managed to get rid of it the first time, I got infected twice more, the third instance disabling my task manager and my registry editor.

Run regular checks with Malwarebytes and watch your internet in/out carefully until you're 100% sure you're in the clear.

[Loyal]

It's possible I'm not in the clear after all. Now there's a smaller-yet-still-annoying issue where I'm unable to open any programs at all unless I manually elect to Open As Administrator. Otherwise I get an error message about not having permission to open it. Once it's open it's all good to go, but it's still a nuisance for things that otherwise open automatically or things in out-of-the-way file directories.

Which is strange considering -- and I checked -- I still have admin status.

[Azisien]

Yeah. The file it corrupts is a file that deals with non-admin file opening. It was annoying as fuck. I ended up reformatting.

[Green Spanner]

Originally Posted by Azisien

Yeah. The file it corrupts is a file that deals with non-admin file opening. It was annoying as fuck. I ended up reformatting.

Hell, I ended up completely wiping my machine.

Not so much because of this nasty bit of work, but due to the masses of viruses that managed to get through the security breach it had created.

Through a combination of regular scans and manual file-deletion, I managed to get my computer back to a half-usable state, before just saying 'fuck it' and pretty much starting again.

So yeah, Loyal, it might be worth restoring the registry if you're still having problems.

[Azisien]

Originally Posted by Green Spanner

Hell, I ended up completely wiping my machine.

Not so much because of this nasty bit of work, but due to the masses of viruses that managed to get through the security breach it had created.

Ah. I took my PC off the network immediately when I realized it was a virus. I don't think it got infected by anything else...

But yeah, wipe that shiz.

[synkr0nized]

Originally Posted by Green Spanner

Hell, I ended up completely wiping my machine.

Just a note -- a reformat will delete all existing data on the machine, so Azisien also completely wiped.

[Green Spanner]

Originally Posted by synkr0nized

Just a note -- a reformat will delete all existing data on the machine, so Azisien also completely wiped.

Even the OS? Because that's what I meant when I said I completely wiped my machine.

It was the only way to be sure.

[Eltargrim]

Reformatting is the definition of completely wiping, unless you want to get down to repeated DBAN levels, which is just unneccessary. You and Azi did the same thing.

[synkr0nized]

Right.

To format a drive, you are resetting all of the sectors on the disk's platters. In some instances, you're just erasing the master boot record and partition tables while technically leaving the data, or more precisely the 1s and 0s set in the platters, in a recoverable state. More often, however, the entire drive is zero'd out, effectively making the drive the same as when it was first made.

In either case, the OS is toast unless you have the right tools to recover the drive/rebuild the MBR and relevant tables in the former case.