Strange virus?

ChrisR

ChrisR

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I'm a schoolteacher and it's Exam-Time, so this is a bit of a nuisance...

Desktop, W10

C: was a 250Gb SSD
D: Data drive.

I saw something on some random website popup from Windows Defender saying it had stopped a Trojan, but an Ad immediately came on top of it, so I closed the window.
A little later, another window crashed.
I did a System Restore, to a week or so ago.

Tried a couple of virus search progs including Malwarebytes and McAfee rootkit finder - nothing.

Virus-like behaviour continued, by browser pages dropping out, to plain black or "Aw Snap", or the browser crashing out. That 's Firefox and Chrome.
Sometimes accompanied by other Windowsy error messages about memory or something "has stopped" , needing a restart.

Then Firefox (my usual) couldn't restore pages, or wouldn't restart.
So I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox.
Same again.
Tried Chrome
Same story.
Tried Internet Explorer, and that seemed ok, but I don't like it.
Then one page crashed on that.

Sigh.

SSD was getting full so I bought a bigger one, and got W10 reinstalled onto new SSD, C: drive.
Old SSD still in there as F: drive
All was fine, reinstalling programs etc until I read F: to see if there was anything I wanted. There wasn't , it's just programs.


I got exactly the same virus-like problems back. F has infected C.?

If I keep trying to run Firefox (or Chrome) things get worse It won't even reinstall without crashing. Then the computer crashes and won't restart.
Power off -on - won't boot. Win10 corrupted.

Tried next morning, computer boots up and is running IE.

What the Hell?
Tried a Memory check. Nothing found, though a deeper one seemed to hang.

All I/we can think is that it's a nasty rootkit which is too clever for Malwarebytes (reportedly the best) to have caught up with yet.

Local PC shop has had a few in very recently with very similar symptoms, apparently picked up in Ads. Two were on the MSN site!

Any ideas?

Deep reformat everything and start again?
Question - How to get files off Data Drive if it's infected? I've uploaded 100GB to Google Drive, the rest should be backed up - unless the backups are infected too :(.
 
What exactly are the symptoms? You're clearly having computer issues but reboots and corrupted windows isnt a common symptom.

Heck with it failing on a deep memory scan there's a good chance it's just a hardware issue like overheating.
 
Thanks.
The software-ish looking things are that it always crashes Firefox - eventually, and Chrome usually too.
It seems to crash when I open a new page, like my email host.
I get either a black page (chrome) "Aw Snap" (Chrome) , or a "We're Sorry, Fireox has encountered a problem".
But it seems to run all day on IE.
Have had it refuse to even download Firefox, or crash immediately on trying to install it, or at other times, run it (after managing to reinstall it.
Other programs either won't install, or won't run. It has failed to install a couple or three anti virus programs.
Acrobat pro though, was fine.
I've down/uploaded a lot of GB from Google Drive with no problems.
SOme design software I'be run fine for years won't install properly now - there are always a couple of .dll files missing, it says.


The less deep memory checks were OK, I'm not sure how long the deepest one should take but it seemed to have hung (32GB ram)

Probably not associated, is that once in a while it doesn't see the D drive (4GB WD Gold) on bootup. Restart always finds it.

Some of the Windows 10 features don't work, like the Recent Files dropdown is always empty, and after pressing the Windows button, I can't focus on the "Type here to search" box.

It may have overheated in the past, cos the liquid cooler fan stopped. I don't overclock so replaced the cooler with a plain fan.
It's an
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz, 4201 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

The fan sounds like it's going low speed - ie slows down after bootup, so I guess not overheating.

Could be a mobo fault? It's an ASROCK something.

It behaves the same at home as it does in the local PC shop.
 
How would that know between Firefox and IE though?
The not finding D thing is very rare. - maybe 3 times in 2 years or so I've had it.
 
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