[mikdavrut]

I left my comp. running yesterday (Sat.) about 30 min. prior to the ballgame (I left to watch the game w/a friend) and Redszone was the only page I was on (running iexplorer). When I came home from the game, it was sometime close to 7 or maybe even a bit after 7. Well my comp. was ALL messed up. I kept getting popups saying that I was having "critical HD failure. ALL my files disappeared (as though the HD had crashed) but oddly enough, I could still browse the net. So I KNEW it had to be some kind of malware. The following would popup about every 25 seconds (close it out, it would continuously pop back up every 25 sec. or so): "system detected problems with one or more installed IDE/SATA hard disks"

And some supposed "scanner" stayed popped up (couldn't minimize nor x it out, could only "move it" to the bottom of my screen so I could see). It kept "appearing" to "scan" my system and found 5 "critical failures" with my HD, and it supposedly "fixed" 6. *ETA - it kept wanting me to "buy" the "advanced" version which would "fix" the "critical failures" that this basic vs. of the scanner could not fix - ie - it just wanted my CC info, so if anyone else out there happens to become infected w/this or anything remotely like it - DO NOT GIVE OUT YOUR CC INFO!!!! I'm sure most of you are smart enough to already know this but just in case!! - end of edit*

So I did some googling and typed into google that "system detected problems" msg. I kept getting and sure enough, it was malware. So I had to run a "kill" prog. to kill off the scanner and the several annoying "system failure" msgs. I kept having popping up. That got rid of that annoying crap. Then I ran Malwarebytes and it found I think 4 infections, and I deleted those. Downloaded "Hijack This" and did a scan but I don't understand what it "finds" and I'm afraid to take any action until someone can look at the log it gave me and let me know what's bad and what's not (cause I KNOW I still have nasties in my system - every now and again I'll hear advertisements when the page I'm on, which has been this one for the last hour or so does not appear to have any "running ads" only static ones. There's also 2 iexplorer.exe running in my task mgr. when I only have one running - so there's DEF. still some problems in my system, but luckily I got rid of the worst of it and I can use my comp. quite normally for now - but I GOT to get these nasties off of my system).

Oh yeah, after using the Mbytes and deleting what it found, I had to use unhide.exe to get my files to "show back up" (this malware prog. makes all your files appear to be "gone" so you think your HD has totally screwed up).

I don't KNOW that I got anything from Redszone and I'm not saying that I did, but it was the ONLY page I left up when I left to go watch the game and when I came back, that crap immediately started, and now you guys are getting some odd msg.? I don't know. It's something that it sure wouldn't hurt to look into. I have NEVER had anything like what I had infect my system last night, man, it was a NASTY infection. In Google searches, it seems to (whatever it was that I had) be REALLY going around right now though as most of the searches that showed up for me were from like March and on from this year. I think some ppl. have gotten it after visiting MySpace pages while others say they got it after visiting Facebook, etc. etc. So like I said, I'm not saying I got it from here, just that it's something that might be worth looking into if others are getting a "threat" type msg.