Thursday, July 3, 2008

A little heads up: computer virus

Picked up a nasty, nasty spyware on my computer yesterday, and spent a good part of the day screwing with my antivirus software (Norton). Judging by the information I looked up on the net, this spyware (Sakora.exe) is a variant of a Trojan horse, and was so new that a number of forums had only seen it once or twice, and the official Norton website didn’t have it in its definitions. I guess I was one of the lucky ones who got an early hit, and I have no idea where I got it—I hadn’t opened any e-mail attachments or visited any new sites.

I couldn’t delete the damn file off my hard drive, and was getting all set to fork over three hundred dollars or so for a tech service to strip my computer down and nuke the thing. Then my dad suggested I take a look at the Processes running in my Task Manager. Lo and behold, there was the spyware, plugging away, no doubt digging through my computer for credit card numbers, bank account info, etc. I ended the process, then went back into my Program Files and was able to delete the damn thing.

So, if for some reason you have the same luck as me and find this thing on your computer (you’ll probably get a few weird popup things, or your antivirus will start going berserk, look for it in your Program Files), go to your Task Manager (ctrl+alt+del), click on Processes, and End Sakora.exe. Then go back to your Program Files and delete the thing. Simple fix, but it appears to have worked for me.

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