battle with GPHONE.EXE virus
last week, i came across this virus, GPHONE.EXE, from an external hard drive that i borrowed and WHAT AN AWFUL PAIN! it duplicated my folders and subfolders in an executable (.exe) format in my 2nd partition which is my backup drive. i’m crazy about sorting and organizing files, so i do have lots and lots of subfolders.
even if my friend already warned me about the virus in her external drive, my AVAST PRO did not detect it so i was like “OK good, nothing harmful here”. then i noticed my YAHOO MESSENGER kept launching itself up after every few minutes. good thing, i don’t save passwords because i found out that what the virus does is to send messages to contacts on both yahoo and gtalk.
anyway, when i started to load my files from backup, i noticed the duplicate files and my computer slowed down a little bit like i’m using lots of apps when there’s only internet browsers open.
that’s when i found out that my TASK MANAGER HAS BEEN DISABLED BY THE ADMINISTRATOR when i hit “ctrl + alt + delete” to check for running processes. oh great. i downloaded the task manager fix to correct the problem then i had to restart. (note: careful on the site, when i opened it, AVAST detected a malware. but the exe file download itself is safe)
then i downloaded AVG for free at download.com, scanned my machine and it detected this pesky virus. duplicates were healed but i had to clean up my registry manually because it kept saying GPHONE.EXE not found whenever i restart. this is when i found out that the virus also disabled my REGISTRY access. i was able to download a fix for it on the same site where i downloaded the TASK MANAGER FIX / REGEDIT FIX.
upon further checking, i also found a TASK on my SCHEDULED TASKS application in windows that would automatically load GPHONE.EXE on my machine every 12PM. i deleted it.
what else… i followed some of the instructions HERE (downloaded GALARY UTILITIES for free which is a very good must-have software) plus the instructions to remove GPHONE.EXE REGISTRY KEYS at that link to manually clean up my machine.
so far, so good. computer’s back to its normal working condition. i’m just a little afraid to connect any external hardware in my computer now because i’m not ready to undergo another battle with a virus yet. what an experience!
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May 6th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
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