My anti-virus software quarantined itself!
This is something odd yet funny and I never thought it would happen.
I recently installed AVG Anti-virus software on my mother’s laptop and found out it was bloated with some sort of Win32.Pr virus that spreads through all exe files it finds in the system. Though it seems not to be harming, I went ahead and told the software to clean all those infected exe files.
Obviously, the AVG Anti-virus software is made up of exe files as well. So as soon as I installed the anti-virus, the aforementioned virus got to them. So while scanning the system, AVG identified its own exe’s as being infected. I said OK, no problem, clean your shit.
But it wasn’t cleaning that it did, it was quarantining (or moving to secure “vault”). And it quarantined its own exe’s (specifically, it’s quarantine module which manages the files in the quarantine). I ended up with 1.6 GB of quarantined exe’s (pretty much all the exe’s in the system) with no way to get them back!
What a lovely situation! I had to format the whole system and install a fresh Windows and the first thing then was to install the AVG software to prevent any similar future situations.
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Comments
January 6th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” - Aliens
When a machine has a virus this embedded into the system, a full reinstall is required. It is suspect and always will be untrusted. I wouldn’t recommend doing eBanking on a machine that’s had a virus cleaned out.
January 6th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Yep, your mothers computer was infected with Win32.Pr aka Parite.B. I wouldn’t beat up AVG to much; almost every anti-virus software fails on clean up when it comes to massively infected Parite machines. It’s hard to clean a machine when all the system processes needed for installing anti-virus software are also infected. How did your mother’s computer get a six year old file infecting virus?
January 7th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Very interesting. I get around this by having a seperate partition on my mothers computer running Ubuntu - it only took me half an hour and about 5 gigs, and she have a secure system from which she may do ebay and other money transactions, and a cop out that allows me to scan your windows partition without having to have it running - very handy for getting the viruses that most windows users get. You can also get linux live cd’s that are just for scanning and cleaning a windows machine.
January 7th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Actually coming to think of it, any decent anti-virus would (should) do the same. As Fraser said, “nuking” the system was the way to go. I’m just glad this was a peaceful virus that gave me a chance to backup important stuff before doing so.
January 16th, 2007 at 3:31 am
That’s what you get from using Internet Explorer to browse the web.
January 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Exactly merk! After the incident, I set FF to be her default browser. She was just as productive and didn’t find it hard to adapt to the new browser.