Ransomware gone?

[Dave Sherman]

My girlfriend's mom had an older laptop with Windows XP. No antivirus, no nothing on it. She lets my girlfriend's boys play on it, and darned if it didn't catch CTB-Blocker. Her mom was telling me about this and was going to pay someone to reformat it. I fiddled for a while, and between MalwareBytes and AVG Free I think I got it back, although it did corrupt all the pictures and documents. They have all those on another computer, so I didn't look into how to restore them.

Is it safe to say that if AVG Free and MalwareBytes aren't finding CTB-Blocker that it's really gone? That poor machine was so infected with malware it was at 100% CPU usage nearly all the time, it would launch all sorts of ads without doing anything, and more than once it blue screened while trying to run MalwareBytes.

 

[cptbarkey]

stick a fork in it, and give the old lady some windows 7 love please. keep windows xp for the garage pc that just plays music.

 

[3800Series]

Consider installing Sandboxie also and sanboxing their prefered browser (regardless of which ever option you/they go with). Cyber security isn't a one layer approach.

You want to stack your resources and Sandboxie is an excellent front line.

Personally tho I would reformat. When you get a virus/malware the damage has already been done. Removing the virus/malware will not undo any previous damage caused by the infection (unless your Anti-Virus agressively sandboxs all new programs).

 

[FastGame]

Originally Posted By: Dave Sherman
I fiddled for a while, and between MalwareBytes and AVG Free I think I got it back, although it did corrupt all the pictures and documents. They have all those on another computer, so I didn't look into how to restore them.


Use Unhide and all will be fine. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t...s-program-does/

 

[Donald]

Get the kids their own PC that you reformat monthly. Run it in a guest network off router.

A personal computer is as the term suggests, personal. Not for everyone else to use and screw up.

 

[dishdude]

I have an old XP laptop from 2006, I installed Linux Mint with Chrome on a cheap 16 GB SSD I got off eBay for next to nothing. It breathed a lot of life back into the old beast.