P
Peter
Just thought I'd share my bad experiences over the last week or so.
On a number of completely unrelated machines I have been experiencing
web browsing problems in particular, but flakey PC performance and
other Internet application failures as well (e.g. Mail and Messenger).
The strangest symptom of all was that Internet Explorer would stop
working after a few minutes. At all times I was able to do pings and
DNS lookups fine. Each of the machines involved was XP Professional.
Some had SP2, others not. Installing SP2 on the SP1 machines didn't
help. Uninstalling SP2 didn't help either. Another thing they had in
common was that they were all fairly fresh builds of XP Pro.
To cut a long story short, despite the fact that Anti-Virus (assorted)
and Anti-Spyware were running on all machines, it turns out to be a
Malware issue. It "felt" like that all along, but even
double-checking with Spybot S&D and AdAware (both free editions)
didn't spot anything. It was only when I installed a proper (cf. SP2)
firewall that I discovered a Malware program called winlogin.exe (not
to be confused with winlogon.exe) trying to access the Internet. As
soon as I denied this program access my problems eased dramatically.
I then followed instructions to remove it and I trust that I am now
clean.
What I've learnt along the way is that the ZoneAlarm Suite and AVG 6
didn't detect this virus/malware and neither did Spybot or AdAware. I
suspect that other AV packages may have the same problem. I also
learnt that Giant Anti-spyware detected a host of (apparently serious)
things that Spybot and AdAware didn't, although it didn't spot
winlogin.exe either.
I'm guessing that what's happened is that the malware has overwhelmed
my router's NAT facility (lots of messages about lack of dynamic NAT
buffers). I'm also guessing that these machines were infected because
they were new builds and were recently vulnerable for the time until
all the latest MS updates were applied.
I hope this post saves someone the grief I've been through but I'm
beginning to suspect that it is becoming so time-consuming and
expensive to protect one's PC these days that it might be easier to do
away with the PC!
Peter.
On a number of completely unrelated machines I have been experiencing
web browsing problems in particular, but flakey PC performance and
other Internet application failures as well (e.g. Mail and Messenger).
The strangest symptom of all was that Internet Explorer would stop
working after a few minutes. At all times I was able to do pings and
DNS lookups fine. Each of the machines involved was XP Professional.
Some had SP2, others not. Installing SP2 on the SP1 machines didn't
help. Uninstalling SP2 didn't help either. Another thing they had in
common was that they were all fairly fresh builds of XP Pro.
To cut a long story short, despite the fact that Anti-Virus (assorted)
and Anti-Spyware were running on all machines, it turns out to be a
Malware issue. It "felt" like that all along, but even
double-checking with Spybot S&D and AdAware (both free editions)
didn't spot anything. It was only when I installed a proper (cf. SP2)
firewall that I discovered a Malware program called winlogin.exe (not
to be confused with winlogon.exe) trying to access the Internet. As
soon as I denied this program access my problems eased dramatically.
I then followed instructions to remove it and I trust that I am now
clean.
What I've learnt along the way is that the ZoneAlarm Suite and AVG 6
didn't detect this virus/malware and neither did Spybot or AdAware. I
suspect that other AV packages may have the same problem. I also
learnt that Giant Anti-spyware detected a host of (apparently serious)
things that Spybot and AdAware didn't, although it didn't spot
winlogin.exe either.
I'm guessing that what's happened is that the malware has overwhelmed
my router's NAT facility (lots of messages about lack of dynamic NAT
buffers). I'm also guessing that these machines were infected because
they were new builds and were recently vulnerable for the time until
all the latest MS updates were applied.
I hope this post saves someone the grief I've been through but I'm
beginning to suspect that it is becoming so time-consuming and
expensive to protect one's PC these days that it might be easier to do
away with the PC!
Peter.