The malware is back...ugh

Wittgenstein said:
Everything I have tried so far has failed. So I was sitting back and enjoying a Let's Play when all of a sudden, a new tab opens. Before I can close it, some fucking shit downloads to my computer. Luckily I quickly deleted it, but that scares me. I'm now afraid to leave my computer alone at all.
take all the files you care about and store them on a usb

reinstall windows

reinstall your programs

congratulations, no viruses
 
I've had a little of your problem in Chrome too, turns out to be that one extension had installed an adware without my knowledge.
 
Javelin said:
Wittgenstein said:
Everything I have tried so far has failed. So I was sitting back and enjoying a Let's Play when all of a sudden, a new tab opens. Before I can close it, some fucking shit downloads to my computer. Luckily I quickly deleted it, but that scares me. I'm now afraid to leave my computer alone at all.
take all the files you care about and store them on a usb

reinstall windows

reinstall your programs

congratulations, no viruses
I have programs that I no longer have the installation crap for. Plus that sounds really tedious.
 
look man you gotta choose between having adware and all your programs or not having adware and having to reinstall all your programs

there's probably not a magic way to just poof all the adware away. from what i'm hearing your computer is totally doomed and needs to be exorcised

besides, i doubt you REALLY need all the programs you'll have to reinstall
 
Wittgenstein said:
Photoshop and Premiere are a couple big ones that I frequently use. I no longer have the files needed to install those.

those two programs are probably...you know
 
I'm not going to say it but if those programs are such a big issue and that you absolutely need to have them back....well I'm not going to break any rules here.
 
Baby Luigi said:
I'm not going to say it but if those programs are such a big issue and that you absolutely need to have them back....well I'm not going to break any rules here.
a.k.a. There's a way to get those programs back, but it requires personal messaging.
 
they think your versions of photoshop and premiere are pirated and you're not allowed to share pirated links here

you probably got yourself into this mess by downloading some pirated programs that came with adware
 
I've had those for a year, and the adware just got here a few days ago. I think it came with the crack file I tried to use to get IG Maker free. Needless to say that failed.
 
Wittgenstein said:
I think it came with the crack file I tried to use to get IG Maker free. Needless to say that failed.
most likely

clear everything related to it off the computer
 
uh

that's probably going to still have the adware

are you seriously unable to part with or reinstall anything less than 320 gb
 
Wittgenstein said:
I don't really want to mine through my entire filesystem. My pictures folder alone has hundreds of things.

So you want the problem gone but you don't actually want to do anything to solve the problem.

Well, have fun with your malware then.
 
I'm trying to copy the shit! It's just taaaaking waaaay tooooo looooong. (currently at 4% and telling me that the time remaining is more than one day)
 
The thing is: If you copy everything there's a distinct chance you're going to copy the malware as well. That's why people are telling you to single out the essentials.

In the future it would also be useful to keep an external backup of your files. There's always the possiblility you're going to lose your computer, either to viruses or malfunction. I've had the latter happen to me like four times, while games were on my harddrive that I worked on for several years. Nowadays I keep a backup on an external drive, to make sure if I ever lose anything ever again, it'll not be more than a month worth of progress.
 
I vaguely remember having some of the stuff you mentioned. For me, I had many shady images off of Google that had stuff attached to it when I downloaded the pictures.

I was young and naive so I wouldn't of known if my sister didn't tell me.
 
I will copy my pictures folder, music folder, and videos folder then. My downloads folder had a ton of stuff that I care about, but if the adware is there then I suppose there's no way.

Also I never heard of adware/malware attached to an image file. That's not an installer or zip, just a PNG, JPEG or GIF or whatever. Shouldn't be malicious.
 
idek I remember having 1000 and getting a blue screen of death and my sister told me it was from my images

could've been from that one game I was forced to download because her friend wanted to play it on my laptop
 
If you find it that tedious to move your 320GB of files, try first to format the C drive, and re-install windows. Because all the adware, and some of the malware I encountered are not viruses (in sense viruses are in your files, working by themselves. Instead, they wait for me installing them to start annoying me). So basically, they are already installed, so re-installing the windows could remove them.

Anyway, when you are installing your programs back, stay very cautious, really. I'm almost certainly that one of the programs you installed is the one responsible for all that crap, so installing it back will basically ruin your whole work.
 
Wittgenstein said:
Also I never heard of adware/malware attached to an image file. That's not an installer or zip, just a PNG, JPEG or GIF or whatever. Shouldn't be malicious.
Not entirely, all three of those can contain userdata or metadata that is not relevant to the picture itself. If you open any of my avatars in Notepad for example and scroll all the way down, you can see I have added my name to them. That is just a small thing, I can make a 5×5px PNG worth 3GB of crap that way. (This is very comparable to the Troyan Horse story.)

Then I haven't even started about what data is required to even download something you won't see after download completes, HTTP headers. These things can be poluted as fuck too (a.k.a. the reason <IE7 should never even be on your PC).

tl;dr Everything can be malicious.
 
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