Techy help needed... OH, Dan Murphy!!!!

[lsyorke]

A friend of mine is tearing her hair out! She killed one computer the other day. Took a new one that she got from someone and just had to get the operating system loaded(never used, but need some tweaking). Took it to a computer place, they loaded Windows XP. No problem last night intially, but started getting thrown offline. Her landlord came down, ran the virus scan and found 13 viruses!(she had only been on one internet site(not the problem, it's my site), downloaded nothing, opened no emails). By this am she had 81 viruses!!

She's dead in the water again. Any thoughts? The consensus here is that they disk that they used to load Windows had a trojan and it's now activated. She's TOTALLY ticked off! The computer place told her that her virus program can't "prevent" viruses, just detect them.

So if she downloaded nothing, opened no emails, opened no attachments, where the heck are these coming from if not from the windows disK???

 

[ktulu]

A friend of mine is tearing her hair out! She killed one computer the other day. Took a new one that she got from someone and just had to get the operating system loaded(never used, but need some tweaking). Took it to a computer place, they loaded Windows XP. No problem last night intially, but started getting thrown offline. Her landlord came down, ran the virus scan and found 13 viruses!(she had only been on one internet site(not the problem, it's my site), downloaded nothing, opened no emails). By this am she had 81 viruses!!

She's dead in the water again. Any thoughts? The consensus here is that they disk that they used to load Windows had a trojan and it's now activated. She's TOTALLY ticked off! The computer place told her that her virus program can't "prevent" viruses, just detect them.

So if she downloaded nothing, opened no emails, opened no attachments, where the heck are these coming from if not from the windows disK???

I'm hoping the disc they used was an official windows xp disc. One question, was XP patched? If not, there are plenty of exploits out there that will compromise XP quick. I installed xp on my mom's machine, I had it online unprotected for 17 minutes and it was compromised, fresh install of XP, no service packs put on. This could be the problem. The best thing to do is format the drive, install XP from an official microsoft CD, install a virus scan program, and activate the xp firewall before putting it online. If you can download the updates for XP, do that and burn them to cd, and apply them from the CD, otherwise make sure the virus scanner is up to date and run windows update before doing anything else on the net.

As someone who deals with network security, I'm not surprised by this. Good luck!

darren

 

[lsyorke]

Thanks Darren. I have no clue what you're talking about, but I'm going to send her this information. So, do I have this right.. if this was not an official Windows cd, that could cause the problem? She gave them the CD, but didn't watch them do it, so they could have used anything.

She's running AVG(virus protection.. she's in Canada) but it's not able to clear any of the junk that is on there.