i caught it in ~2009, from playing a popular browser-based game. i don’t remember the exact infection vector, but it involved a malicious banner ad, ActiveX controls, and pressing ‘Play’.
it was a package deal: adware, a RAT, a redundant rootkit, and a drive encryptor. the more you tried to clean it, the more it damaged your OS and files. if you reinstalled your OS: it’d still be there.
in the worst case, it could reflash your BIOS or disable your fans. this was how — in the end — it bricked my PC: the northbridge and CPU were burnt, my harddrive thrashed, and the BIOS flashed.
the BIOS was fixable, but not easily, and i’d need to rebuild it anyway. so: back to the landfill to scavenge for parts.
it had a worm component, which is how i caught it again a few years later from someone’s underused laptop reconnecting to the network. heuristic analysis had gotten good enough to kill it, but not before it dropped some adware (which was easy enough to clean up manually).
‘SuperAntiVirus 2011’
i caught it in ~2009, from playing a popular browser-based game. i don’t remember the exact infection vector, but it involved a malicious banner ad, ActiveX controls, and pressing ‘Play’.
it was a package deal: adware, a RAT, a redundant rootkit, and a drive encryptor. the more you tried to clean it, the more it damaged your OS and files. if you reinstalled your OS: it’d still be there.
in the worst case, it could reflash your BIOS or disable your fans. this was how — in the end — it bricked my PC: the northbridge and CPU were burnt, my harddrive thrashed, and the BIOS flashed.
the BIOS was fixable, but not easily, and i’d need to rebuild it anyway. so: back to the landfill to scavenge for parts.
it had a worm component, which is how i caught it again a few years later from someone’s underused laptop reconnecting to the network. heuristic analysis had gotten good enough to kill it, but not before it dropped some adware (which was easy enough to clean up manually).