Slow Computer?

My computer suddenly became slow and unstable after recieving an email claiming my EZPass permit was expired. Turned out it

had dumped the iexpore virus malware on my system. After several days of frustration , was able to run combofix in safe mode and

now it seems to be removed. Check in Task Manager for iexplore multiple listings to see if this is causing problems in your computer.

My computer suddenly became slow and unstable after recieving an email claiming my EZPass permit was expired. Turned out it

 

had dumped the iexpore virus malware on my system. After several days of frustration , was able to run combofix in safe mode and

now it seems to be removed. Check in Task Manager for iexplore multiple listings to see if this is causing problems in your computer.

Hopefully Combofix did a good job of cleaning this & you're good to go now. If not, feel free to create a topic in the "Am I Infected" section of the forum. 

Watch out for these type of scams. Anything that requires downloading or opening an attachment, be very suspicious of. Some of these emails only requires opening to distribute malware, or whatever the payload infection is. Simply delete anything that doesn't look right. 

The EZ Pass scam isn't new around here, several members were either burned, or knew others who were. It's best to go direct to your account online & check for status when you receive these emails. 

Also watch for any shipping notices where you know for 100% that you're not awaiting a package. These notices has an attachment & when downloaded/opened, will begin to spread malware immediately throughout your computer. The user may or may not see anything out of the ordinary going on, until it's too late. 

I say this with the risk of sounding redundant, implementing a backup plan & sticking with it can reverse a lot of bad things, be it an infection, Windows corruption or hardware failure. Was backing up my main Windows installs 2x weekly, but since am now using Linux Mint 17 90% of the time, have reduced to 1 time weekly, on Tuesday. That way I can backup before Windows Updates are issued. 

Given the several good free choices we have, there's no reason not to backup. 

This also can work in the event of a slow computer, provide that the slowness has to do with the OS & not hardware. 

Cat

Thanks for the links !!!

I had something similar, as I was trying to get Rojadirect, sports feed. I inadvertently click a wrong link, catching a virus. I ran the scans & though I had got it off. It came back, so I was told to run the logs from a said program. I ran the scan again & sent out the logs. Sure enough, deep into the system, the virus was still there. Had to run a super deep scan ***EST; something like that.

After that, no problems. Always run scans, once a week & updated regularly too. My only bleep is all the spam email I get. The same email that EZPass scam, where they say you owe some $$.

I never click on that stuff. Probably why I have so much spam to begin with?

 

 

I never click on that stuff. Probably why I have so much spam to begin with?

mixpix, great point you have there! 

The more spam one clicks onto, the more one will receive, unsubscribing only makes it worse. I maintain a Yahoo email account, for the purpose of registering free software, as many of these sites will sell their customer lists to anyone for a few bucks. And it shows too, over 75% of the email in the Yahoo account is Spam. and I mean a lot of it, like 200-300 emails per week. It does little good to go through the trouble of marking these in the inbox as Spam, what I want is in created folders, will look through the list once weekly, and mass delete both the Spam & Inbox. 

It's well known by many here that clicking onto & opening Spam, the result will be a computer infected with at least spyware, which will slow it, the more one clicks, the more infections added, the more the computer will slow. Not even counting the time that I've spent on other forums, just here, Yahoo is has been frequent common denominator with infections, much of it through the ads listed. Not being the powerhouse they were a dozen years back, they're not as picky about who places ads, compared to Outlook.com & GMail, ad revenue keeps the bills paid. I wouldn't click onto an ad on that site for anything, and when I do check that email account, it's from Linux Mint. 

The power over what can happen by clicking onto an unknown sender cannot be stressed enough, don't do it. Mark as Spam/Junk & then delete all.of them w/out opening. 

Cat

I have an issue I hope to get some help on.   Lately, my computer seems to be very slow on start-up. I dont have many programs that run on my start-up, I've just noticed lately when I boot that the computer is working very hard (i can hear it churning..)  but it takes 5-10 minutes until I can open any programs/internet, etc.    also, over the past year or so I've run into some 'freeze up' issues.  sometimes it just freezes and I need to reboot (manually).  other times it will freeze and a long constant beep will sound...so I manually reboot.

I've run normal scans of Avast and Malwarebytes and nothing seems to show up.

I think I still have all programs needed for scans here (combofix/dds,etc) but I forget the orders,etc.

Any help or thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Rick

Topic closed for reasonable housekeeping.

If anyone has an issue with a "slow computer", he/she should begin a new topic of her/his own, in the appropriate forum.

Louis