Control Center: Viruses, and Wasted Time

Filed in archive General on March 7, 2010

I've decided that Flickr is becoming a dangerous place. For whatever reason, I get offered more viruses and malware at Flickr than any other place at the moment. Late Thursday night (maybe early Friday morning) while looking for a photo on Flickr to use with a blog I screwed up and clicked the wrong thing. The next morning I got up and found my laptop hijacked by the a trojan called the Control Center Virus. Instead of Windows, I got a control panel that told me the two ro three dozen things wrong with my computer. Kinf of ruined the taste of my coffee.

Fortunately I have an abundance of computer resources in the house. I got on another laptop, figured out what I had, and found a nice guide to removing it at Im-Infected.

Friday evening at got to work on removing the virus. I burnt several CD's trying to boot from that drive. Nothing worked. I finally figured out that Ctrl-Alt-Del still got me the task manager and allowed me to run new tasks (like the rkill DOS application that closed the Control Center).

I loaded Malware Bytes and ran a full scan, which took a couple of hours. And, wallah, I had my laptop back. But I lost six or so hours of my life.