karen, there was a problem with photobucket back in january with some kind of trojan horse on photoubucket.

I can't find any info about a new one that is present now.

Could it be that you picked it up a few months ago and it is now causing full havoc on your computer?

Fran

I doubt it, Fran. I use photobucket all the time and virus programs are always running. It would have been detected before now.

It was obvious when it hit. The only other window I had open was this forum, then when I opened photobucket- bam!

I wanted to warn my friends here because I know many use photobucket. As I said that PC is not useable and it won't connect to the internet either. Service guy from the internet provider was here today and said it's the computer. It might be a goner.

This laptop is working now but it's my husband's and I don't generally use it.

Does anyone have an email address to report this to photobucket? I won't click on their site and risk yet another expensive computer.

Karen

try info noted here:
http://whois.domaintools.com/photobucket.com

Hi Karen,

Do you recall the name of the trojan? I'm just wondering why my antivirus tools doesn't detect it. I use photobucket almost everyday.

Please keep me posted.

Thanks,

Neil

I still can't find any info about a new trojan horse on photobucket. My daughter uses it and uses a pc as well as a mac. she has no problems or indications that there is a trojan horse on her pc.

I have nothing on my Mac, but then again, macs are pretty safe in the virus department.

Neil, i've had several people check for me that use PC's and no antivirus tool has picked up anything.

Karen,

If it is your computer, it is possible that you picked it up elsewhere and once you started using your computer on GW and photobucket, the trojan horse got busy, but you didn't get it from either GW or photobucket.

I have heard of that happening.

I am going to post your original post on the computer forum here on GW and see if anyone knows anything about it.

Fran

No doubt about it- I'm pretty much a computer idiot. My son, a computer geek, agrees the Microsoft products are the food of viruses. He won't touch any of them, doesn't use MACs either. (he uses DOS, unix, all kinds of weird stuff). But it did hit like a brick as soon as I got on photobucket.

I just googled "photobucket trojan horse" and got 27,000 hits...
Googling 'photobucket virus" bring up 1,430,000 hits.

My husband is also very adept at these things. He got a similar trojan horse recently and was able to remove it but it required downloading several specific programs to delete it. The problem now is that the infected computer can't be connected to the internet. The service tech said it could be a result of the virus but he doesn't know. Seems unusual that this developed within about an hour of the virus infection.

Tina, thanks for the link but no way I'm going to the photobucket site and risking infecting my husband's laptop, too.

Neil, I'll try to remember to ask my husband the name of the trojan horse. FWIW, I've had that photobucket account for 3 years with no problems and our virus protection never detected a problem until I was hit, either.

Like I said I am pretty clueless about this stuff but truly believe I got it on photobucket. Just wanted to warn those who might use the site.

Karen

Karen...do you recall what you did when you went to PB on that fatal day?

Most, if not all of their virus problems have involved the pop-up ads which magically appear on your screen. If you click on any part of these ads, even the "X" , "No Thanks" or "Close" part of the ad, you get the malware.

I use Firefox for my browser, and AdBlock as an add-on. I don't get any pop-up ads in PB, or here on GW, or anywhere else. AdBlock prevents them from appearing, so I don't have to worry about closing them.

Simply going to PB's website will not make you vulnerable to any virus, *IF* you have adequate anti-virus software on your computer. 99.9% of the time, some positive action by you is required, like trying to close a pop-up ad.

You need to have adequate AV software *AND* an adequate firewall installed between your browser (and your email client) and the internet. If you don't have *BOTH*, you're vulnerable to malware.

donn, We run symantic anti malware and a firewall. I never click on any ads.

Virus is trojan vundo.

Don't think I did anything except click on PB, then PC locked up, couldn't close PB...

Karen,

go to the computer help forum. the folks over there are waiting for you on the forum to help you out with your computer.

Trust them, they are great with help and may very well save you a huge expense with your computer

Here is a link that might be useful: post on computer help forum waiting for you so they can help you

Service guy from the internet provider was here today and said it's the computer. It might be a goner.

I this service guy reputable? Your information maybe destroyed and your computer in its current state may be unusable, but I would think you would need to have physical damage to make it a goner. A good tech person should be able to completely reformat your hard drive and registry to get you back to day one of when you first started up your computer. Granted you lose whatever you had but you should be able to salvage the computer itself. I know the geek squad from Best Buy does that regularly, although they are not inexpensive.

Here is one tip I can share about the malware Antivirus 2009. It will popup a window and it will tell you that your computer could be infected by a virus. I forgot the question that was written on that same dialog box. The button choices are OK and Cancel. Either buttons you click, that malware Antivirus 2009 will install itself.

Here is what you should do when assuming it happens. Let's say you are running IE. What you should do is run Task Manager. You can run Task Manager by right clicking on taskbar then selecting Task Manager from the menu. Or you can press Ctrl+Shift+Escape and it should bring up Task Manager. Once Task Manager is running, click Processes Tab, then search for IEXPLORE.EXE. Select IEXPLORE.EXE then click End Process button. This will prevent the j-a-v-a-script code from executing the trick.

Antivirus 2009 is a nasty malware. If it's already installed, download malwarebyte and it should be able to delete it easily.

:)

Here is another tip :)

About ads, I don't like them especially the ad.doublelick.net. Doubleclick had an issue before when they were installing malware automatically.

In order to block them, I added their full hostname in each machines's hosts file and then pointed it to localhost instead. This way, then it pops up, it's not calling their webserver anymore but it's connecting to your machine's ip address.

You can find the hosts file under c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc. If you don't see any hosts file, you can just create a new one. The hosts shouldn't have any file extension.

The entry I put there is
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

127.0.0.1 is the ip address of your own machine and isn't reachable on the internet. You can do some experiment by pointing any site to 127.0.0.1 but make sure you delete it if in case the site is a good site like www.gardenweb.com :)

Karen, I think that is the same one that got my computer. (I am using my laptop from school.) It infected my computer twice. My school computer dude was able to get rid of it the first time (I could not connect to the internet). This time it has really messed up the computer so that the computer can't be used at all. It keeps shutting down. He has it now trying to fix the problem but he said it doesn't look good. I was using the McAfee security system that comes with my internet service. My question is why can't these security systems catch these viruses? That's what they are for. I am royaly pissed at my service provider.

Viruses have their own signatures. So if a virus' signature isn't on the antivirus' database, it won't be detected. The antivirus companies have to wait for their developers to capture the virus and put it on their database. Once they have figure out the fix, they add it on their website so that their customers can download new signatures/fixes. It's a business. :)

There are nice security applications that is able to control damage or prevent damage. We have Cisco security agent installed on our computers and it knows if a memory resident program is trying to execute an external command or maybe trying to access the registry. It pops up and asks a question wether to allow it or not.

proudgm: Do you happen to know where or how you picked up the virus?

It sure is a PITA to be without my 'puter.

Karen

Karen about 3 weeks ago I picked up a virus or whatever on my laptop.It kept running scans and telling me I had trogen horses, several viruses yada yada. It looked like it was coming from Microsoft. Anything I hit led me to a page to enter my credit card #. I could not connect to the internet. I also have Macafee. I was on the phone w/ them for hours! I ended up bringing it to my comp. guy he was able to fix it and update my comp. a bit. He said I just picked it up and that it happens sometimes. Luckily he only charged me $40 to fix it. I do hope your comp. will be fixed soon.

Annette(a lot of the above posts sound like chinese to me)

Annette: Your post made me laugh- a lot of those posts sound like Chinese to me, too. That's why I leave computer maintenance issues to my husband. He's really good with this stuff but since it won't connect to the internet it has been tough. Also, he only has so much time to spend on it.

My husband probably won't let anyone work on that PC because he has a lot of sensitive stuff on there- not only our own but sometimes that of employees of his company, too. He has at least started to back of some of the information in case he wipes out everything to reinstall the system.

That PC is 3 years old so he says the easiest, cheapest, best thing to do might be just to replace the computer.

Fran, I did go to the computer help forum. My husband had already tried all of the suggested fixes except one, which didn;t work when he did try it. So we're right back where we were last Thursday when infected.

I'm not very good with this laptop,either. I can't even type on this flat keyboard.

Karen

Three years old! lol, it's still a baby! I have one downstairs that's still running Win98... (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). I cringe at the thought of backing that one up... ;]

Maybe just replace the hard drive; they're (usually) cheaper than a new PC.

I second donn's recommendation of Firefox with AdBlockPlus whatever you wind up with.

AdAware (I think that was the name of it) used to be good, although I haven't used it for a while. Ours was set up to be started manually, though, and we didn't do it all that often. We did not have many infections, and most wound up being cookies.

One of my brothers recommended Avira and Spydoctor for freeware protection, but neither one allowed fixes of the problems they found (then what's the point??), and both regularly threw up splash registration screens (not worth it if can't fix the problems!) so they've been uninstalled.

Now you all got me paranoid about this old Dell I'm using. Gonna swap it out with my 20" Mac here in the Florida room.

Yeah, I'm a switch-hitter. ;-)

Prof

I use the freeware Super Antispyware, and firefox with adblocker. Once I quit using Internet Explorer and switched to firefox (without the Adblocker add-on even) popups virtually were at a serious minimum. Now with the Adblocker add-on popup' don't exist period.