I hate viruses

Working on a client computer for the last two days that is massively infected.  When they handed the machine to me, there was no firewall, no virus protection and windows updates were way out of sync.  Whoo boy.

Windows update was not working at all – one if the viruses had put in their own DNS entries so that when you click on Windows Update, you got sent to Google.  It had also removed DNS entries for all of the update sites for the major anti-virus and anti-spy-ware sites.  Once that was corrected I was able to run several virus and malware scans with updated software.  There were some viruses (50 or so) that were cleaned, several reg hacks that were fixed and the drives were de-fraged, but I’m still having issues.

Right now, there are two problems left.  First, some of the recent windows updates won’t install (sp3 for example).  The installation starts, goes for a few minutes then I get a pop up that says “installation cancelled”.  Frustrating, but I’m assuming this is a virus I have not eradicated completely yet.  The second problem is that the machine will randomly freeze.  I don’t know if this is hardware related (heat? disk? memory?) or part of a virus.  This was the initial complaint from the owner, by the way – that the machine would randomly freeze.

I’m using Zone Alarm, Ad-Aware, IO-Bit, and malwarebytes.  Next up, McAfee.