Legends of Equestria - Forum

Got hit by the MoneyPack: federal bureau of investigations  Virus.   Fortunately the thing is benign, and simply requires a system restore.

Heh, funny, Never heard someone use benign in the terms of a PC virus.
I also had one of those annoying browser redirect viruses that I had to manually fix in one of system 32's subfolders

I hate those so much.

I guess I'm pretty lucky. Not really had any big ol' bad viruses my Anti-Virus couldn't take care of.

I went through 7 antivirus programs now :U

I hope to get to know my task manager so well that I can just terminate the virus's activity whenever it pops up... X3

One of my room mates got a virus that told him the FBI locked his laptop down because he downloaded illegal software. The only way to unlock it was to go buy a CVS gift card and send it to a certain email address(clearly not government). Some of these virus' really don't try too hard  >.<

yeah it's pretty bad...FYI: the FBI is more likely to just knock on your door and drag you off rather than give you prior notice.

Quote from: Ründo on 2013 Mar 27, 00:49:23
yeah it's pretty bad...FYI: the FBI is more likely to just knock on your door and drag you off rather than give you prior notice.

Informed him of that after I was done rolling on the floor laughing

Avira hasn't let me down yet!

I've been through 3-4 Antivirus programs and none have worked as well as Comodo. I switched from Norton to Mcafee to AVG and finally found Comodo. Norton back when we used XP couldn't even protect from the blaster worm as far as I know. We had one of those worms that restarted your PC constantly. Eventually I just formatted the system. One thing sucky about worms is their ability to spread without the user doing much at all if I recall they got through some exploit early on in XP's life.

Mcafee proceeded to release all the viruses it had quarantined once the subscription expired at least that's all I can assume that happened, as right as it expired the PC began to crash. Likely it was just the protections expiring is all I can think of because a PC crashing right after something expires is so unlikely that it can't have been a coincidence.

(This was also on XP so It was likely early on in it's life when exploits for it were easy without proper security. Likely service pack 1. Since we had our old XP around 2001+.)

I don't have much to say about AVG as I liked Comodo the best after I switched to it. It's one of those security systems that only allows things you want to run on your PC and asks you about everything you do run, secure from automated threats but if the user themselves ran anything harmful that's a different story. Although Comodo does have lists of unsafe programs that it checks, and definitions with each update.


Anyways hopefully that virus wasn't a time activated one, if it was system restore will just delay it although it could be one of the less well designed viruses that system restore can get rid of. Also hopefully your system doesn't have some form of malware that downloads viruses over time that would also suck.  :s

It's probably gone.  as for Malware...ugh, I hope that isn't how it got on.  Would be such a pain to remove.

When I was a kid, I liked to play the 3-day free trial of ToonTown. I did that two or three times, and every single time, once my trial got to the 3rd day, my computer would start having issues working and would almost die. We had to restore the computer to a previous state each time. X3 So, I nearly killed that computer two or three times for an obviously infected kid MMO. It was such a fun game, though. I didn't realize where the virus was coming from at first.

Still a bit odd that it would kick in on the 3rd day, though. o_o

Quote from: Book Smarts on 2013 Mar 27, 00:41:52
One of my room mates got a virus that told him the FBI locked his laptop down because he downloaded illegal software. The only way to unlock it was to go buy a CVS gift card and send it to a certain email address(clearly not government). Some of these virus' really don't try too hard  >.<

the person that made that virus did not think it through that well did they :P

Quote from: Lord of Madness on 2013 Mar 27, 12:50:54

Quote from: Book Smarts on 2013 Mar 27, 00:41:52
One of my room mates got a virus that told him the FBI locked his laptop down because he downloaded illegal software. The only way to unlock it was to go buy a CVS gift card and send it to a certain email address(clearly not government). Some of these virus' really don't try too hard  >.<

the person that made that virus did not think it through that well did they :P

"I'm not so sure how well this plan was thought through. Master?" (i have a big head and little arms)

I remember dealing with a registry virus that involved my manipulation of CCleaner. Somehow the virus had shut down my Avast antivirus. I got Spybot Search and Destroy and a few other antivirus things (malwarebytes included), and eventually my computer got back to normal. I felt kind of accomplished because it was mostly my manipulation of a simpler program without an antivirus to get rid of it. (Kill off all the startup programs that you deem malicious, and find registry errors and fix them)

Also, the TeaTimer program Spybot uses to make sure viruses aren't getting in through registry (shows you registry changes and asks if you want to allow or disallow them) uses up a lot of CPU, which is a little annoying.

My computer is so horrible that if I want to do something, I just do it anyway lol I use AVG and CCleaner, and I only bump into a virus once every few months.

I am very smart when it comes to virus' though, but my brother ...if I see Ilivid on here one more time...

Also, if any of you use Firefox or Googlechrome, get adblock, usually helps with some stuff, can keep you away from virus' sometimes.

I hate viruses. The XP Defender Virus is the worst I've encountered.
It just blocks everything, and you can't go on the internet, paint, type in notepad.
The only solution is just starting from scratch.

I myself use a couple of stuff to protect me.

Microsoft Security Essentials (Surprisingly good and light!)
My brain!
and Spybot Search & Destroy (I love the possibility to blacklist known viruses etc. before they even enter my system :D)

I can't really call avast an antivirus, kinda slow and useless, so really I don't have antivirus, was looking for something decent.  I forgot about spybot....can't remember why I stopped using it.

As for Norton, my father told me....oh, 7-8 years ago it was garbage and to never use it.  I assume he knows his computer stuff being a school board IT supervisor.

Ok, just got fooled by that freaking Ow.ly trojan worm.
Basically it's a virus that only screws with the proper operation of skype, causing it to become unstable and some functions will not work correctly
Don't click on ow.ly links :U If you do, heres what you do: Uninstall skype, Run a virus scanner, run CCcleaner. I mean GET UP IN THAT HARDDRIVE If you want this gone, just to be safe XD Reinstall skype after that, and just to be safe, like Itty Bit told me, Change your password >.>

Since i got my laptop, i've been taking good care of it, never gotten infected, or slowed down(Though it has a weak CPU).

If you see an ad that can seem to fix your computer or stuff like that, i wouldn't click it, they're most likely Trojans. This is why i have adblock on chrome. ^^ Although ads got weird on me..

http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Skype-spam-virus/m-p/1092504#M82322

Tried following the instructions here, but didn't really solve the problem. Turned my Skype into a gigantic CPU eating monster, so I turned it off from my startup programs via Msconfig. The program just stays there and eats away at CPU without allowing me any access to it :U
Btw, this was before I reinstalled that I did this method.

Quote from: Pipkin on 2013 Apr 06, 21:00:44
I can't really call avast an antivirus, kinda slow and useless, so really I don't have antivirus, was looking for something decent.  I forgot about spybot....can't remember why I stopped using it.

As for Norton, my father told me....oh, 7-8 years ago it was garbage and to never use it.  I assume he knows his computer stuff being a school board IT supervisor.

Norton has improved since then by a lot...but It's probably still not the best out there.  Essentially it's not garbage anymore.  I would still look into better ones if you can.

I use Norton for Constant scan and protection, virus searches, and constant internet safety and protection, I use Malwarebytes for Deep computer scanning and protection once a day, and I use Mechanic Pro edition to clean/tuneup/speedup/virus check/defrag/repair/update my computer.

Kaspersky is a wonderful AV

I decided to switch to Comodo base on what Trege said on here

It found quite a few viruses, 2 of which were keyloggers.

One virus was found on my backup drive's old Windows files from back when I still had XP....nice work AVG  :l

Quote from: Charizard_2 on 2013 Apr 06, 18:09:20
I hate viruses. The XP Defender Virus is the worst I've encountered.
It just blocks everything, and you can't go on the internet, paint, type in notepad.
The only solution is just starting from scratch.

This happened to my old xp computer -_- bu I wasent even able to turn out, it just died to the point where it would black screen on startup. We had to take it to a shop to fix it, and that was like $300

My dad got the Op's "FBI greendot card" virus, also required system restore -_-
it ended up setting back the computer from xp SP3 to SP2, which makes it incompatible with a lot of different things

How does one even GET viruses? I've never gotten them! (Not that I ever want to)

I got the same FBI virus. At first I freaked out because it told me that if I didn't pay the money, I was going to go to jail. I finally caught on that it was a computer virus because the FBI doesn't send messages telling people that they are being arrested. I tried to remove the virus myself, but it didn't work. I finally gave up and went to one of those stores where they fix computers. They fixed it, but it was a lot of money to get fixed.  ono

My computer came with Windows Defender. Anyone know if that's a good antivirus program?

I think Avira has a decent free offering, heard some mixed stories about AVG. Malwarebytes is also good as a secondary, you can use it to scan for some sorts of malware that AV often misses. Just make sure to download the program from the makers site, not some knockoff 3rd party offering you paid stuff for free. (or free stuff with malware added...)

Also lol FBI virus. There were actually variants made for that virus for other countries (badly translated, but with a completely accurate copy-paste of anti piracy laws). It completely freaked out the paranoid roommate I had at the time, who was not just generally suspicious but actually diagnosed by a psychologist with paranoia and PTSD so yeah, it took quite a lot of convincing to get him to realize it was just a scam.