Spent the weekend fighting computer virus
This is the first blog post I have written within WA. I blog on my website but just never thought I had anything good to share here. I feel I have to tell everyone about my weekend.
Friday night late I had a popup appear while on the internet. I thought that was weird since I have a blocker in my antivirus program. I did not think much of it closed the computer and went to bed.
Saturday morning I woke up to a real mess on the old computer. When I sat down to the computer it was humming, it does that when a video is running but no video was playing.When I went to a page that page opened but then instantly another page opened to an advertisement. This was not good.
Still that crazy humming was driving me crazy. I opened task and checked the usage there and a calendar inside microsoft works was using 89%. Closed that and the humming stopped. Still had those popups every where I went. Finally got the bright idea to look at the page source on one page and a program called webshield was there.
Sure enough it was on every page I went to on my computer I have no idea where it came from. After visiting about two pages the calendar would start with the high usage and humming again.
That microsoft works came on this computer years ago and I have never used it. I tried uninstalling works but it would not respond. Inside programs I also found webshield and had no luck uninstalling it either. I would click uninstall my computer would ask me permission to run the program and right back to the program page with no results.
Webshield is a very tricky malware/virus it will infect everything on your computer. It even put links on my WA website pages. When I went to my site every page had links added that I did not put there I was sick.
Finally after hours of trying to kill webshield with no luck I bought a different malware program. When I ran it, it found 275 different places that were infected. The program took almost two hours to run but it did the job I deleted the 275 places that were infected and all is well now.
I went back into programs and webshield was gone. When I went to microsoft works it uninstalled with no problem. The links that were on my site were also gone. I think webshield had attached itself to microsoft works is my best guess.
I have rambled on enough. Just beware of Webshield it can cause havoc to your computer. I did go back and upgrade that malware program to a yearly subscription from the free trial version. If you would like to know about it send me an email and I will give you the url. I am going to become an affiliate for them but I will just give you the url to their site not my affiliate link. I don't want to sell any programs here.
I checked around on the net and I guess Webshield will run and hide somewhere else faster than you can delete it. I hope this will help someone else avoid this problem.
Thanks for reading
Tracy
Recent Comments
2
Thanks for sharing your panic / misery Tracy. A couple of other words of advice for those reading your blog... Scan and Backup.
Your anti-virus is updated regularly as new threats become known, but something may lodge on your computer before an update issues. Scanning, even once a month, will help catch those sleepers.
I have to tell you that having a backup is really nice too. Malware can cause all kinds of grief, but I've been known to screw things up badly from time to time without any assistance from malware. It's great to grab a good copy from a backup to make things right again. It's quick and easy - if you've got a recent backup
Thanks again!
Dennis
Thanks for the reply Prestones I do have a backup and update it often. good point