A
Angus Rodgers
Yesterday evening my daughter opened a couple of files
apparently sent to her by friends using MSN Messenger.
Her Win98SE system acquired a new file:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\winDSL.exe
which started trying to connect to the Net, but Kerio
caught the attempts, and I created a rule to stop the
connections.
Today I used Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel to stop
this program being executed at startup. It defended
itself by creating further startup entries, but in the
end I managed to disable all these, and move the file
to what I hope is a safe location. (I'm a bit vague as
to what exactly happened: perhaps there were initially
two entries, of which I only spotted one?)
Avast! antivirus failed to detect anything amiss. I
haven't yet run Ad-aware, Spybot, or Stinger (I haven't
updated them recently, because I resent every minute
spent dealing with this kind of ******* ****, and I
admit to having become lazy).
A Google search didn't turn anything up, either.
Does anyone here know anything about this particular
*&$!£#* nuisance?
The only symptom I noticed today was that streaming
audio playback by RealPlayer stuttered all the time.
I think this may have been caused by a high level of
CPU activity, but I didn't look into the problem very
carefully - I just wanted to get rid of the wretched
thing.
(For all I know, this may just have been a diversion,
and the real intrusion may be continuing. I'm under
no illusion that just deleting this one file will
necessarily have fixed the problem.)
apparently sent to her by friends using MSN Messenger.
Her Win98SE system acquired a new file:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\winDSL.exe
which started trying to connect to the Net, but Kerio
caught the attempts, and I created a rule to stop the
connections.
Today I used Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel to stop
this program being executed at startup. It defended
itself by creating further startup entries, but in the
end I managed to disable all these, and move the file
to what I hope is a safe location. (I'm a bit vague as
to what exactly happened: perhaps there were initially
two entries, of which I only spotted one?)
Avast! antivirus failed to detect anything amiss. I
haven't yet run Ad-aware, Spybot, or Stinger (I haven't
updated them recently, because I resent every minute
spent dealing with this kind of ******* ****, and I
admit to having become lazy).
A Google search didn't turn anything up, either.
Does anyone here know anything about this particular
*&$!£#* nuisance?
The only symptom I noticed today was that streaming
audio playback by RealPlayer stuttered all the time.
I think this may have been caused by a high level of
CPU activity, but I didn't look into the problem very
carefully - I just wanted to get rid of the wretched
thing.
(For all I know, this may just have been a diversion,
and the real intrusion may be continuing. I'm under
no illusion that just deleting this one file will
necessarily have fixed the problem.)