My Mom..a senior..had a terrible experience; I think it's a virus -- I'll explain

Hello,

My Mom, a senior, is new to owning a computer and although I try to walk her through every bump in the road as she learns to operate her new computer...unfortuneatly she was hit by something...I'm thinking it was a virus but have not heard of one hitting this way. Here is what happened: she was looking at her email (hotmail) and opened an email from her neice -- it had an attachment that was supposed to be a cookbook of some sort. She clicked on the attachment but did not actually open it because she was unsure what it meant by "this document needs adobe to open"...she said that she closed out her hotmail without incident, and then went browsing for sites looking for homemade dog biscuits...she told me that she looked at 3 or 4 sites and then out of the blue, some very graphic porn came up on the screen. She was shaken up quite badly by the content of some very disturbing porn including women, men and children. She told me that the it said Utube on the screen and then a big black and red flashing ad came up telling her that she was infected by a virus and that her personal and financial info was being compromised right now. She said that no matter what she did, the screen would not go away. She could not close out the screen and was so scared of what was happening to the computer that she just unplugged it from the wall to make it stop. She did not try to shut off the computer any other way first. Prior to the details above, the only other attachment she opening recently was a media file...again from a family member...she opened it and again did not play it because she was unfimiliar with the prompts to install her media player. And then the only other odd thing that has happened recently, is that she came back to her computer after it had been in sleep mode for a while and out of the blue (or she can't remember all of the details), a window appeared asking her if she wanted to do something and then restart the computer. I was not home when she called to ask about this, so my son told her that restarting it after a program update was normal. I can't figure out from talking to her what the details were on this one.
I try my hardest to help my Mom with learning the ropes on the computer. I've installed AVG (free edition) for her and am surprised she stumbled into such a mess. It is a new Dell computer and on Monday, I'll be going over to her place to see if I can figure out from her history what happened.
Has anyone heard of this type of thing? I've done search after search for some kind of info. on this with no luck.
Your feedback is very much appreciated.
Thank you for your time with this very long message.

 

Hi Sam67,

Sounds like your Mom picked up some Nasty, un-invited guests. : (

I’ll be here Monday and help you clean up the mess but first I’ll need to be able to see what the mess is..

Download and rename TrendMicro HijackThis.exe (HJT)
• Double-click on HJTInstall.
• Click on the Install button.
• It will automatically place HJT in C:\Program Files\TrendMicro\HijackThis\HijackThis.exe.
• Upon install, HijackThis should open for you.
• Close HijackThis and rename it.
• Go to C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\HijackThis.exe
• Right click on HijackThis.exe and select Rename.
• Type in Sam67scanner.exe and press Enter.
• Right-click on Sam67scanner.exe and select Send To > Desktop (create shortcut)
• From the desktop open Hijackthis. (aka Sam67scanner)
• If using Windows Vista, Right-click and Run As Administrator.
• Click on the Do a system scan and save a log file button
• Hijackthis will scan and then a log will open in notepad.
• Copy and then paste the entire contents of the log in your post.
• Do not have Hijackthis fix anything yet. Most of what it finds will be harmless or even required.

Although we have renamed Hijackthis to Sam67scanner, we will still refer to it as Hijackthis or HJT.

Do this, Sam, and I will analyze the HJT Log and issue some instructions to start the cleanup. This process may take some time, depending on the infection, so be prepared to run some scans and post some Logs..


‘til then,

2OG ( also a senior )

 

2OG...thank you for taking the time to help.

I went over to Mom's house on Monday and ran a virus scan of her whole computer; AVG detected 2 and rectified them.

Things seem to be going well now and I hope it was as simple as that.

Thanks again for replying.

~Sam

 

OK Sam,

I hope that works out. If you do have problems, later, just jump in here.

2OG