I received a call from a SiC (Sister in Christ) yesterday afternoon. She was beside herself with problem she had noticed on the family PC in the great room of their house. When she went to Google and typed in a search, all the sites came back as pr0n. She was not amused. I told her I would come over at 7-ish and she thanked me.
I got there and the kids were playing on the PC, so she shooed them away (she has 2 teen boys, a pre-teen boy, and an elementary age girl) so I could work. Knowing that this was a virus/trojan issue, I immediately took out my USB stick (loaded with goodies!) and ran two spyware checks. A total of 15 DIFFERENT spywares/nasties were on the machine, so I sanitized it. I started running Windows defender and it found one more..this was serious.
While the names of the nasties escape me, what they did does not. One of them was a DNS hijacker (which sent anyone who typed in or clicked a URL to go to a pr0n site) and the other turned off all her anti-spyware and anti-virus software, rendering then useless.
Once that was done, I ran my anti-virus and I found eight virus infected files...not horrible, but not good, either. We sanitized them, did some uninstalls of outdated software, clean the registry a bit (I was not able to do much without spending a lot more time) and purged their PC of some of the pr0n that was hidden by one of the teen boys (they were sneaky...they hid it under their dad's home folder...but he rarely uses the PC...he has his own). About the time I was doing some deleting the man of the house comes home and I greet him with a handshake and he asks me how things are going...I jokingly call him a pervert for hiding all the pr0n on the PC (we all got a laugh about it) but told him that it was not new...most of it was a year old. They were aware of an issue about that time and have dealt with it, so I just sanitized the drives. It took a while.
The SiC was livid the entire time I was there...not at me, but at the teen who has been messing with the PC. She gripped my arm several times in frustration and wanted to know how to protect the PC better. To be honest, I think the machine would do better to be wiped and reloaded, but that is not my call. It will take time and the family would have to be a lot more careful with surfing habits.
I left about 11:30 PM...I was tired then and I am still tired. It is going to be a long day (a couple of meetings, one of which will be heated) and I am still waiting on a phone call on something. While that may be the end of it, I do not think it will. Issues of this type are not just thorns, they are spears!
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