Human ingenuity never fails to impress me when it comes to committing acts of idiocy.
Malware..argh!!
Posted 11-10-2008 at 02:15 PM by PathMaster
Machine came into the shop not working correctly. The issue? Both optical drives no longer work. Upon inspection both were no longer in My Computer, but were in Drive Manager with a yellow symbol over them, which came to be Error 39. Doing a restart and popping in UBCD, showed me that both drives still worked, so it must be a Windows related error.
Look up error 39, do the suggest reg hacks, nothing. Do some more research..other hacks, some utilities, nothing. See that it might be malware related. Do my usual cleanup routine, which cleans up just about everything, still nothing.
Well maybe it is hardware, so I try another IDE cable and another known working drive..still nothing. Ok..using Ccleaner, I was browsing the startup items when I come across Pad39a starting up from the D: drive. Wait a minute...there is no D: drive, both drives are not accessible. Do some quick searching about Pad39a, and nothing comes back about what it does really. So I disable it and restart the machine. Sure enough, the drives work. The malware was causing the issue. Very clever.
Anyone with some really interesting malware stories?
Look up error 39, do the suggest reg hacks, nothing. Do some more research..other hacks, some utilities, nothing. See that it might be malware related. Do my usual cleanup routine, which cleans up just about everything, still nothing.
Well maybe it is hardware, so I try another IDE cable and another known working drive..still nothing. Ok..using Ccleaner, I was browsing the startup items when I come across Pad39a starting up from the D: drive. Wait a minute...there is no D: drive, both drives are not accessible. Do some quick searching about Pad39a, and nothing comes back about what it does really. So I disable it and restart the machine. Sure enough, the drives work. The malware was causing the issue. Very clever.
Anyone with some really interesting malware stories?
Total Comments 2
Comments
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Here's one. Looking for DVD playing software, so I hit up Download.com. Find one that's free, has multiple 5 star ratings and positive comments. After downloading it I can no longer get online and the software cannot be removed, at all.
A Windows restore undid the install, but my god. Totally blindsided by that one. |
Posted 11-10-2008 at 02:23 PM by Sazime
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Yuck. Usually safe to download from there as well. Will keep an eye out though.
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Posted 11-10-2008 at 05:02 PM by PathMaster
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