For the last week I have been fighting a rash of viruses on my desktop PC. The worst, and most insidious one is the Skynet malware virus which hides and is a real pain in the butt. Im tired of spending money to find things to detect and remove it only to find that it is making the problem worse. I am ready to nuke my whole hard drive at this point. So right now, looks like it’s going to be much fun this week.
Now to back up some 60 GB of MP3’s from iTunes and my writing files. Is there an easy way to do this?
And if anyone has some good, difinitive advice on Skynet and its eradication, it would be greatly appreciated. At this moment, Ive spent days reading and Im not finding any answers that are worth a damn.
Life Belongs to Sekhmet 
I feel your pain.
What A/V program do you use?
Skynet is a memory resident worm, so it generally infects every .EXE as it opens.
My suggestion is to boot into safe mode with networking, then run the AV program. Then check the AV manufacturor’s website for specific intructions as most of them will have an online removal tool there.
An online site I use frequently as a backup for my installed program is TrendMicro’s Housecall at http://us.trendmicro.com/us/products/personal/housecall/
It all started with google redirect. At this point now, if and when I connect to the internet on the other PC, it will reboot the machine as soon as the connection opens. It will also do this, I just discovered, when I put a thumb drive into the PC. Apparently it opens up a connection to something and then reboots the system, propagating it once again.
The antivirus I have now is AVG, I do have a paid license. I will see what I can do but at this point I am so frustrated.
If you hit Control+Alt+Delete, and look at the processes to figure out which one is the Skynet virus, what helps is to go into the Program Files and delete the folder it’s in, then run every single anti-virus program you have. I use MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, which is not only fantastic, it’s completely free as well.
I did the Malwarebytes and it worked – for about two days, then the damned thing came back. I ran StopZilla, I have AVG paid, I have a registry cleaner, too. Nothing is hitting it. And any time (!!) I connect to the internet or attemt to, the damned thing reboots even after StopZilla has found two more incidents of it, supposedly removed it. It spawns over and over and over again.
I tried to restart in safemode, with and without a Dos Prompt, It will not let me do that. It has disabled system restore point, all of that. I am at a complete loss. Each time it reboots it says “Windiows has recovered from a serious error” and I copy the line of code, but I am getting nowhere. I need to take the damned thing to a shop or get a new PC. Again, my issue is I have so much stuff on this I am afraid I will lose it ALL and I really don’t want to do that since I have a small fortune (!!) tied up in software and MP3’s.
Email Eric; it’s sort of his job to fix things like this. 🙂
I don’t have his email address sweetie. Please email me at fannyfae at gmail dot com. 🙂
Oh, it’s okay — I can give it to you. I thought he had it on his profiles… *L*
dark_wesley@dreadmachine.com
Did you manage to get it cleaned out?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I did get rid of the thing. The biggest challenge was not eradicating the virus / malware. That part was much simpler than the downloading and reinstallation of all the software. I am almost there.