Malware programmers deserve to die in freak yachting accidents.

I’ve had a not-happy day chasing some piece-of-shit trojan that somehow managed to turn up on my computer. AVG kept finding and claiming to nuke it, only for it to turn up all over again. Running a full system scan found nothing, though the intermittant detections continued. Spybot S&D found nothing,and adaware2008 mysteriously began to hang on loading. I tried an online Virus checker, but strangely the site returned unknown faults preventing the scan from completing.

Doing a search for the file (Trojan Horse generic14) revealed that I wasn’t alone with this irritance. It seems to be a rootkit thingy, hiding itself from most antivirus programmes. In the end I downloaded several Rottkit scanners using a second computer, burning them to a CD-RW to port them across (by this point I had unplugged the ethernet cable as a precaution on the infected machine).

The first three found nothing, although AVG continued to report threats detected. In the end it was the fifth rootkit scanner that spotted a suspicious registry key activated on boot that seemed to be doing something weird. The scanning programme’s report of what files were involved tallied with some of the information I could get out of AVG.

At last it *seems* to have cured the problem. I’ve been able to run this computer from boot without any warnings arising – that’s far better than before. I’ve even been able to connect to the internet without a flood of extra warnings from AVG. Fingers crossed, because this was the most irritating piece of malware I’ve ever come across – even downloading the most up to date detection binaries from AVG and porting them across on a CD-RW (the Trojan was preventing any update of anti-malware programmes via the internet) didn’t help, so there is a big hole in protection that people may think they have from using AVG.

I’m certainly no novice user, but this malware has taxed my knowledge of computing to the limit to get rid of it. I was so close to formatting this box and going through the thankless task of a complete reinstall.