Another low for Spyware? It seems that somewhere between here and there, there are too many low security settings being installed all over the place. It could be part of a disastrous trend, or it could be that some people are simply banking on never having to know about Spyware again. Let’s hope it stays this low for a while longer.
Firstly though, if you are seeing these error messages, then your computer is most likely infected:
It appears that somewhere between here and there, there are too many entries associated with the VZ.win32.agent.gcjacket process.
Wow, that’s a lot. So many error messages coming through, I couldn’t even keep up with when they were pouring in. The bandwidth got pretty bad, to the point where I couldn’t even play my multimedia!
It’s not uncommon to encounter this problem, and it was time to act. I performed a search for everything that could possibly go wrong with my machine, and then I went to check my friend’s computer as well.
What I found was very startling. Not only was his computer infected with the same virus that infected my computer, his was also running abnormally slow. Cause it was starting to stall out, and read/write the same instruction more than once.
At this point, I knew I had to remove this threat before it caused any worse. So I run an infection removal utility through my Windows enthusiastically.
And to my squeamish, I then opened the antivirus program and protected my computer from future attacks. I never want to see another message about a Trojan Horse, or any other website that looks suspicious. I don’t want to spend my time towards recovering another PC from an attack, if there is such a thing. So I deleted the Win32 Agent Antivirus 2003/trojan, installed a new anti-virus program and everything seemed to be well again.
Until I started getting messages, again in a torrent, coming from my friend’s computer. They were obviously not happy about the fact that I had removed the Win32 Agent Antivirus 2003/trojan, as there were numerous images of the reinstaller cards. That was when it hit me like a Mac truck … someone had been trying to install malware on his computer for body and soul.
At first, it made sense to me that my PC had been hacked. After all, the last thing he did was to install antivirus software. How could that be?
But when I started going through his computer, I noticed that … not only had the spyware been there, but the Trojan had been installed as well … along with manually adding new entries to the registry. So, he’d been doing it for a while, and the malware was building up on his computer, faster than him learning anything.
As I started to gather the facts, I realized that …
My computer had been hacked into — again
He who had been watching my every move had been … well, let’s just say that he enjoyed watching me … after I had uninstalled his old software.
And as I started to look back and see exactly what had happened … well, you can guess what happened next.
What does this have to do with Internet Security?
Let me explain …
The larger the target, the easier the hack.
In other words, if you are sending information to the wrong server, or having your computer hacked by someone who knows your IP address, then you can figure out pretty quickly that you are not going to like the results.
What happened next?
Well, after almost a week, I had gained back almost 100% of my email traffic. The firewall had been turned off for pharmacies … something had to be done.
In fact, the day I discovered this (gregoryoffers up … pharma … [email protected]), was the day after my biggest billing day of the year. It was unbelievable. They charged up over $50,000 on my account.
At this point, I had a gut feeling … something wasn’t right.
So, I stopped by to see what the device was telling me.Hubs are great when it comes to seeing what is happening on your computer … but it is also essential when you are sending information to another computer over the Internet.
My immediate thought was this: If my computer was telling me that something was wrong with my email account, then I would have caught it before it got shut down.
Before I could ask myself what the hell just happened … the device on the computer somebody was looking at was showing me that in almost every case, all of the devices connected to the router were zombies.
Zombies are computers that have been infected with viruses or worms. These zombies computers can be turned against their owners just like the non-zombie computers.
