Infected Personal Computer (fixed now)

I just posted this message elsewhere, but I thought it might be a good idea to place it in the General section as well.

As we know, Babble was hacked. Supposedly it did not infect our own personal computers, just the site's server. I just ran my weekly FULL SYSTEM SCAN through Norton, and found something that has never happened in all the years I've been online. I had 17 tracking cookies and 3 spywares in my system. Needless to say, I got rid of them. Now, I've had plenty of times where viruses have tried to infiltrate, but Norton always blocks them and I always keep my security system up-to-date. So this is something brand new to me, and I have no idea how it happened. It *may* have occurred through PB.

I suggest you run a FULL SYSTEM SCAN now (the one that takes a long time), and check to make sure that you don't have these high-risk bad guys living in your computer. One was even able to read my key punches to get my bank account numbers, passwords, etc. I'm sure I'll be bankrupt by tomorrow.

You may want to run the FULL SYSTEM SCAN each day for a short period of time, just to be sure. Like I said, I don't know if this is because of what occurred at PB....but I'm very cautious with my system (all the bells and whistles), and I didn't have a clue. Just be careful, guys, and run the scan.

God bless,
Sandy

Glad you got your computer back to snuff. It's hard to say where they came from as they can lurk on any webpage they want to attach themselves too these days. The hackers are getting smarter thats for sure.

I run something called ZoneAlarm and I'm extremely happy with it. It askes you if you want a specific program to interact with the internet and you can basically surf the net without being detected. It really keeps you in "stealth" mode. I highly suggest using it!

Good luck to you!

Hugsssssss
J

IDK. I went to babble to see what bob had to say. I didn't go or do anything else there or anywhere, and my computer (desktop) bogged down considerably. I have McAfee with automatic updates, but ran Ad aware SE and it found similar junk as Sandyweb's. After removing it, I then defragged... it's ok now. (I'm on the notebook tonight though ) I choose not to go back to the site, even to change my password...unless that isn't wise. I know he doesn't close accounts usually?

I find Adaware is the best tool for removing tracking cookies and such. I run a full system scan every night before I shut it down and invariably I find 30-40 tracking cookies!

Adaware is made by Lavasoft, if anyone wants to download it. The SE is free.

well i guess all i can say is that if i clean up my computer before visiting babble and then i visit babble my computer is okay after visiting babble (except for an additional cookie or two which you similarly get from visiting other webpages).

you might want to read the thread again sky because your question as to what bob is likely to do has been answered already.

one important thing is that correlation doesn't imply causation. i very rarely get junk mail or anything like that. when i get some i start to wonder what i've done differently...

but fact is that people do get spammed sometimes. there are programs that trawl the internet looking for email addresses (this is partly why people write 'at' instead of '@' and 'dotcom' instead of '.com'). i used to get a brand new data mine (used for advertising purposes) every time i visited hotmail login.

adaware is great :-)
i've found a lot less datamines when using firefox compared with IE too, and with switching from a hotmail acc to a gmail acc.
zonealarm is pretty good too (to stop programs connecting over the internet when you aren't aware of them)
no one virus program is able to detect (and fix) all viruses.
i'm pretty sure that it is reccomended that people have 2 different programs and run them regularly, of course.
AVG is a pretty good free downloadable virus check. it regularly requests that i update too, so seems to be fairly up to date with viruses.

Good points alexandra...just a note to those who might not realize it....please don't try to run 2 antivirus softwares on your computer at the same time!! It does not work and you can mess up the works pretty good that way.

I find the best thing to do is keep it going with one antivirus program and visit the websites at symantac, avg, etc. for free online scans. I have had much luck with the trendmicro site and they have found trojans and viruses that my program missed.

It's always a chore trying to keep up with these goobers who try to spam/infect/track/do harm to our personal computers.

I hadn't realized that you were still posting to me, as I don't read you onsite. I didn't know you could keep bashing my posts. I saw the other thread, I read a lot here. I don't go to other sites like you assumed. I don't believe in coincidences either. I will do fine without bob's input too.

It was good to read how someone had a problem and fixed it and warned others, like myself, though too late for me