Re: What infection might these "symptoms" indicate?

From: Vladesch (dont_at_spam.me)
Date: 07/06/04 

Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 18:52:36 GMT

"Garret Swayne" <garret@garretswayne.com> wrote in message
news:3yuGc.6863$oD3.5505@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net...
> I'm posting this in behalf of a friend of mine whose computer seems
infected
> with a worm or virus of some sort. Here are the "symptoms":
>
> 1. Somehow her Internet Exporer is prevented from visiting the Norton or
> McAfee websites for help. Whenever she navigates to one of these
anti-virus
> sites, she gets a "This page cannot be displayed" error. She can visit
> other sites on the web, but not these anti-virus sites. We haven't tried
> them all, just the two primary ones I know of--Symantec (Norton) and
Network
> Associates (McAfee). And the sites are not just "down". I check with my
> non-infected computer, and those websites display fine. But she can't
from
> hers.

Search for a file(s) cales HOSTS
Delete all but localmachine

>
> 2. I got her a copy of Norton Anti-Virus 2004 and installed it on her
> machine (a Sony Vaio lapton running Windows XP home edition). Supposedly,
> it installed fine. But whenever we'd try to execute the AntiVirus program
> or the Live Update program, it would open a window and start executing,
but
> then the window would unexpectedly and inexplicably close. Like the
program
> was being internally terminated by something.

Its terminating Nortons.
Try running in safe mode (hit f8 on startup), or disable the virus in
startup with msconfig.
Sometimes they are hard to spot. They use names like WINMGR or MSRUN etc etc
to try and fool you.

>
> 3. She's noticed some other odd behaviors but can't exactly describe
them.
> But outside of what's mentioned above, her computer seems to function
fairly
> normally. She can get her email, she can surf the web, just not the sites
> mentioned above. But she's scared to do any of that because she doesn't
> have any functioning AV protection.
>
> Do any of you AV experts out there know what kind of infection might cause
> symptoms like these? We installed Norton Anti-virus software, but the

This is pretty standard for many worms.
Run the latest patches, turn on the firewall.

Relevant Pages

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