It's prettyu nasty...the info I saw over at bleeping computer said remnants could not be fixed, my friend said that too.

MB deleted about 6 programs associated with it...but it came back.

I run a dual boot XP/Ubuntu machine, acronis true Image, an external hard drive (which houses the Acronis disc images), and SOS Cloud backup for my data.

at this point I'm wondering why pay for the "live" version of MB if the threat is known, but gets by anyways.

When the virus first hit i saw the java window and said ....fugggg...and a few minutes later I got a hard drive failure message that didn'l llok right. Sure enough, I booted into Ubuntu and the hard disk was fine. But since I was in ubuntu i went ahead and made redudant copies of everything, lol.

Good luck with it.

I'm up and running. Well, actually, I'm still trying out different drive images. Typing on the netbook now. Edit: I found a date I like and my Ubuntu install came out unscathed.

With acronis it only took 20 minutes to return to normal. Last night I was playing around trying to fix the virus with my mad computer skills....NOT!

Acronis true Image is worth its weight in gold. Except for Iolo system mechanic, I have never ran across a more productive and life saving program. Its saved my tail at least 3 times in the past year alone.

Check back, let me know how the clean up went.

I was on this forum when the virus popped up.

I had a few other windows that had been open a few hours, but I'm not sure all the pages I had loaded.

This virus is hardcore!

I've dealt with plenty of viruses on Windows, this is killer.

I used RKILL to shut down the virus long enough to get MBAM to scan my drives. After the MBAM scan + reboot I can't find anything on my PC. I had tons of stuff on this PC (4+ years old).

My last C\ drive backup to my external usb hard drive is two weeks old, I'm restoring now.

I really don't think this virus formatted my C\ drive, but nothing (zilch) shows on even the C\ drive, it's just empty. It would have took a long time to format this drive (1TB) so it has me scratching my head on this one.

It will take me all night to finish the restore from the usb drive, it's still running...

I would pay $$ to kick the mofo in the sack, that wrote this virus.

Mine got me while I was looking for a wordpress plugin. You might try a google search under wordpress sidebar subscribe plugin. It hit from a ranked blog, like i said, the website stalles, i saw the Java window pop up and then the hard drive errors and MB blocking outgoing traffic.

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another nugget of wisdom - do not run a dual boot Windows / Ubuntu machine, and then use Windows Powertoys to change your default file locations. confuses the hell outta Acronis, or me. Heck, probably both.

The good news, just to be safe i grabbed another 2TB at Staples, USB 3, $120 on sale, that saves $50 off regular price.

What a festive weekend I had. Friday i found out somebody hacked my cell account and used both my pending smartphone upgrades. Then I got the virus. Frustrated, I went to play with my horses and got chased by an Africanized bee.. ******* chased me about a quarter mile, I did the tuck and roll, threw my back out and finally I said screw it, go ahead and sting me...then it disappeared. Coulda been rich with the viral video if somebody had a camera on me, i imagine it was funny as hell.

Yukon how did you make out?

I'm still missing entire drive contents that show up hidden. I have a few minutes left after making a another complete backup of all my data and pics.

I've changed out 6 different drive images and am not sure if it's the virus, or the way i have my drives partitioned (two hard drives, each partitioned differently).

Soon, we'll find out. I'll probably do a reformat, I am trying to save my current drive structure with Ubuntu in tact, but might not be able to. Getting dual monitors to take on Ubuntu always proves to be a royal painnin the arse, I'm trying to avoid that.

I updated my last comment about the Yoast WP plugin.

I don't run Yoast, I only had the web page open in my browser (no plugin installed).

I'm thinking that Yoast website might have been how I got hit with the virus.

My advice is to backup everything you want to keep on an external USB hard drive.

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Holy smokes Yukon - it was the hidden files issue. that means the virus is resident on the system files * somewhere * and re-attaches to a disk image from an earlier date.

Ill add when I did the follow-up with your tip, to get rid of the annoying gray on the FILES and FILE FOLDERS, you do the same as you outlined, except start with:

right click, PROPERTIES, uncheck the Hidden + Read-Only checkbox > Apply changes to this folder & all sub-folders > Apply > Done.

Also, if there are system files in there, explorer will hang. apparently it will not let you change the properties from "hidden" so when you select a series of files to uncover, it will hang. Simply un-select the folder which contains the system files.

i've noticed I cannot do an entire "'select all"; instead I'm selection lesser amounts of files and then changing their properties. If I select too many, Explorer hangs. Kind of sucks, but seems to be working.

I also noticed too that after you have un-grayed everything using the above-method, you can go back in under Tools/folder options, and again choose not to display hidden folders, and it will again hide the system files which should be hidden.

THANKS FOR THE TIP YUKON

sent ya a thanks

Oh, and it's not the Yost site, I tried it out.

Same here, Yukon, running a couple of old XP computers....a 3 year old Asus netbook and 6 year old Dell.

My desktop Dell - the original hard drive also works but it was only 80g so I formatted it, loaded it up and then set it in storage in case of a catastrophic failure of my newer hard drive I installed.

The virus is gone, it was only the settings it left behind. It took a lot of cleanup but in the process I re-organized things and found out half the memory I was using was redundant backup files. So now I have 920G of free hard space on drive 1, 470gb on hard drive 2, 500gb on external drive 1 and now, 2TB on the new external drive. Wow, lol.

I will sync local backup onto the new 2TB and the last item of business is to contact SOS cloud storage and figure out how to fix my online cloud data backup with them since I restructured everything.

Learning more about the files structure was good (hidden files) and Powertoys for Windows made things pretty easy too.

I lost a few days of time, but now the computer is B-A-N-G-I-N-G!

Thanks for your help.

Which part? lol

Seems the accurate info is contained down in the discussion section, but you have to pick thru the responses to find a solution whcih will work on your computer.

The best bet to resolve the issue is to visit bleeping computer and search it out.