trojan/malware warning (merged threads)

Thanks for getting it up and running! I didn't know where to go and waste time!
My computer gave up the ghost just after this all started, not sure if it is related to the virus, as AVAST never gave a warning.
On the plus side, I had a great reason to give up the 7 yr old PC and buy a Macbook pro. I like it, the bank account doesn't.
Black screen of death= new macbook

 

That virus successfully killed the last working windows machine in my house.

Yes I had virus protection, McAfee, useless. Also I followed advice given on this thread, no help.

Hopefully we are past that now but the damage is done.

 

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I agree with calzone regarding this, also with a little more work it is possible to make it look very close to what the old STR looked like.

 

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So why have other, similar "v bulletin based sites" not having similar issues? Why not switch servers, reload the old version on bulletin and the reload the user stats and profiles and be done with? I've seen it done in the past but to upgrade from one version of vbulletin to another.

 

Why aren't others having similar issues? That's like asking why a hacker targeted one server over another one. No one knows but it happened to us and we had to deal with it.

About switching servers - that would just not have been feasible at all. Would have taken time for the host to setup another dedicated box. Then we would have had to reinstall all the system software and packages. Then we would have had to migrate all the websites over (STR's the biggest but not the only site I have hosted on the box). Then we would have had to hope and pray that there was a backup of the site before the infection happened. Since the database itself might have been storing malicious code, we would have had to restore from an older database backup. That would mean that we would have lost days and maybe weeks of posts & threads. And even if everything went perfectly after days of work, we still would be sitting on a vulnerable piece of software which could mean we're at square one again if STR was targeted one. And that's without mentioning other nitty gritty details like downtime while DNS propagates, potential incompatibility issues between code and different system/software, etc etc.

Where did you see it done before?

 

Unfortunatly, it cost me my laptop. Still down, working my ass off just to retrieve important info from it.... resume, videos, raw footage........ Running linux on it to get into it, but still.... it got into a rediculous amount of files........ Lost half the music, half my videos, not sure how much further it goes yet..... Will end up wiping the harddrive to get everything back into proper order.

Good news is, it hit just the laptop, all the other pc's caught it once the laptop flagged my network at home.

 

Damn, sorry to hear. It's sometimes easier to take the hard drive completely out and connect it to another computer as an external drive then try to retrieve data that way. I had to do it that way on my Macbook Pro a few months ago.