Hello Blogland. :wave:

I did something very stupid on Monday and thought I'd share my experience with you. Please feel free to totally ignore this and move on... but if you're an avid net browser, I suggest you stick with it and read on. :yes:

Okay so I'd been up half the night and was tired when I committed my act of gross stupidity, but I'm not offering that up as an excuse... just kind of setting the scene, so to speak.

I was browsing a site offering a full list of somewhat dubious software... :roll: ...when my anti virus software picked up an error. I looked at the message Alias Trojan Detected and thought to myself "Ah ha! We'll soon deal with that!"

I donned my helm, grabbed my trusty shield and slid my sword from its scabbard... I'd dealt with Trojans before and knew I'd be able to slay this little beast. I rushed into the fray and left my network connections open...

Big mistake!

It took perhaps two minutes to isolate Alias.C and dump him in the quarantine bin. While my back was turned however a second generation of the Alias Trojan snook in and dumped its bloody payload all over my freaking laptop...

I found myself with numerous versions of ZLOB and AGENT roaming my hard drive, spawning temporary files by the thousand and ripping through my Outlook contacts list...

I disconnected and ran a deep anti virus scan...

I located no less than 39 errors and was able to isolate each and every one. I quarantined 37 of them; the other 2 were in my restore files and I'd need to take action to clean them out.

I disabled System Restore and re-scanned, killing the final 2 nasties.

The next task was to reboot with a clean system.

Big mistake number two!

When my laptop rebooted I was expecting to find things back to normal, but no. No programmes list, no shut down or log off buttons, Task Manager disabled, hard disk hidden, Administrative Tools disabled, my user account compromised, my network settings fritzed.... BUGGER!

I set to and began the long process of checking through my Windows registry, editing or deleting the Trojan's work... this was early on Monday afternoon.

I guess I should add here that messing with your registry settings is NOT a good idea unless you know what you're doing... if you're not sure, leave well alone!

By midday on Tuesday I was starting to get a tad frustrated because it seemed everything I did was having completely no effect. Worse than that, my eyes were going square! XX(

Using another PC I pulled information from the net (via Microsoft's developers web) about the problems I was experiencing and struggled on. :??:

I made some progress, but couldn't resolve all the problems... I finally gave up yesterday having wasted almost three days and did what I should I have done to start with... namely, reformat my hard drive and start a brand new installation! :##

Thankfully I keep my data backed up, but the installation process takes hours and hours and frankly I do have other things I'd rather be doing... >:-(

So, here's the point...

This new breed of Alias Trojan is a real pig of a thing because primarily it's no more than a spoof. Very easy to clean and very low threat value in itself; the real problem lurks in the dark and slips past when you're not looking...

A little research tells me these AGENT Trojans are often attached to software websites promising free downloads, while the ZLOB Trojans are often attached to codecs for music or video files.

If you're downloading stuff from the net, beware of these... they can make life very difficult if you let them.