Short PC reinstall became long
Yesterday a friend asked to look at his old computer. He told that computer crashes randomly with Blue Screen of death (BSOD). He suspected to be an HDD problem due to bad sectors or so. He also wanted to save his pictures if nothing else can be done to make it work. Well, I took the PC for inspection. First of all, I tried to save photos – copy them to flash memory. Started up the computer and what you know – Antivirus software expired long ago, the virus is thriving. Found out that it is worm: Win32/Brontok@mm. From its description, I found that: Win32/Brontok is a family of mass-mailing e-mail worms. The worm spreads by sending a copy of itself as an e-mail attachment to e-mail addresses that it gathers from files on the infected computer. It can also copy itself to USB and pen drives. Win32/Brontok can disable antivirus and security software, immediately terminate certain applications, and cause Windows to restart immediately when certain applications run. The worm may also conduct denial of service (DoS) attacks against certain Web sites.