Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Combat with a computer virus!

So my computer came down with a virus. Terrible news. What this one SEEMS to do is spam Google with requests for data. I think someone is just trying to make their website look popular, and maybe raise up its Google ranking. That is conjecture. What I noticed, is that every time I turned on my computer it would tell me:

You (or a program) have requested information from www.google.com

Searching on the internet told me two files named fmideploy.exe and flsmontr.exe might be involved, although nobody really seemed to know what they did. I looked in my system folder and found both of those files, with very recent creation dates - very suspicious indeed. So I took a chance, and deleted them both. And then I continued to examine the System folder, sorting the names by file extension, and then by creation date. And then I again saw, that I had newly created versions of fmideploy.exe and flsmontr.exe! The files I had JUST deleted had been recreated 20 seconds later. So I got off the internet, and again deleted them. And 20 seconds later they had again recreated themselves.

I didn't like that - there is something else on my machine that is amiss. But I can't find what it is. So I tried another option. I deleted the two bad files, jumped immediately into notepad, and SAVED empty documents with those two file names. And that seems to have fooled the piece of the virus that I cannot find - it is happy to see that the two files exist, and does not recreate the troublesome versions of them. Now when I boot up my computer, both of my empty documents briefly open and then close - but no program is asking to connect to the internet anymore.

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