I might have a virus. Or a trojan. Any advice?

[tishaLA]

Hi all....

I'm cross posting this from the lounge in the hopes I can get some advice.

Somehow, something got access to my yahoo contacts (address book) and sent out a slew of emails, some of which bounced back. The emails contained links to websites I don't recognize (http://ex-motif.com/mariejose.html, http://inijewels.com/Zubeda.html, http://medikaldetay.com/isabel.html, etc) and won't go to because I don't know what they are and I'm afraid I'll get a virus if I go there.

I've run a thorough search with both my Sophos anti-virus (UCLA's anti-virus software of choice) and Spybot Search and Destroy. The only thing they found was a cookie from Right Media, which I then got rid of. I also went into my yahoo account and changed my password in case this happened because of phishing.

Does anyone have any other ideas? Is this something serious?

[Berserker]

1. I checked them all and

all I got was The page cannot be found. Oh and yahoo sucks use gmail. If you are protected don't be afraid of those sites. If your not protected WHY? You can do it for FREE.

[tishaLA]

2. I am protected. I have anti virus and spybot too

so I don't know how they got into my email contacts.

[Warpy]

6. Chances are that your Yahoo account got phished or hacked

and your own computer is just fine. Changing your password was a great first step. If it happens under the new password, consider moving your email to gmail or even hotmail.

You can also try running a free scan at http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/activescan/ just in case it's an exotic bug the Chinese have found and nobody else has.

[CK_John]

3. SpywareBlaster can replace spybot S&D and will take care of RightMedia which

just places 3rd party cookies on your system. They are basiclly an ad company and very annoying.

link for SpywareBlaster <http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/>

But you should run MalwareBytes and check for a rootkit malware.
link <http://www.malwarebytes.org/>

[woo me with science]

4. Run Malwarebytes Anti-malware

and Superantispyware. If the virus is keeping you from accessing the Malwarebytes download, run Superantispyware first, and that sometimes fixes the problem.

If those don't work (they have usually fixed anything our computer picked up), I would go to a free help board like the one at majorgeeks.com to have someone walk me through cleanup.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

5. I agree with this

Those are the two that I use in combination for getting rid of (almost) any malware that is infecting a PC, including a lot of root-kits.

[Steerpike]

7. Lots of great advice here

Initially run CC Cleaner and a Dat remover program. Then you might try disabling your system restore and then running Malware Bytes from Safe Mode...