Help! Weird virus - Airwick/Harpick adverts playing in the background!

Vegeta

Vegeta

Vegeta

Soldato
Joined
6 Nov 2004
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Hi. My pc randomly plays audio adverts of Airwick/Harpick in the background when no windows are open and nothing is running in the task manager.

I have windows 7. I'm running Avast! Free but it doesn't pick anything up. Anyone know how to fix this?
 
You don't use MSN Messenger do you? It has some video adverts which pop up randomly by the clock at the bottom right.
 
Just a little thought here but check the volume control and see if the wave volume has been turned down (just checking a hunch but considering your getting an advert in the background and not what I was expecting I might be wrong), also have you done a boot time scan with avast (as long as your running a 32bit operating system).
 
I've seen a printer that started printing adverts for no apparent reason, but it's the first time I've heard adverts playing from seemingly no open programs :-)

If you have rebooted and the advert still plays, you might want to check what's listed in Msconfig > 'start-up' tab.
 
How do you do a boot time scan? Not sure what you mean about checking the sound volume why would that make a difference? All on full. Yeah I use MSN but the ad's are different one's being displayed to the sounds. No internet explorers are running when the sound is playing but I just checked the volumer mixer (like demonix said) and it says internet explorer is running and there is sound coming from it?
 
Right even when I set it to mute the thing closes then opens again so the mute doesnt stay. Can I just uninstall internet explorer? It's useless and crap anyways.

EDIT: Right uninstalled internet explorer let's hope this does it!
 
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A friend has a similar issue at the moment, random pop-up adverts or IE running in the background.
There's usually 2 instances of IE running when checking task manager.
Nothing wants to shift it, although I wasn't paying full attention as it was just attempts to fix whilst round watching the GP.

Annoyingly it breaks the Realtek audio drivers. Reinstall fixes audio but come restart its broken again.

We're just going to go a Windows reinstall on this one as it's a pain but... Not sure if anyone has had/fixed this on here? Would be useful for future.
 
If I'm right, I think this is a virus called 'Black Internet', which my PC was infected with 2 weeks back. This causes extra iexplorer.exe processes, audio adverts to be played, and sometimes issues with the volume (for example, my 'Wave' bar in the volume options would mute randomly, like demonix referred to). The best way to find out for sure is to check your temporary internet files, looking for a 'loader.exe' and 'smss.exe'.

If it turns out you do have this, to get rid of it is fairly awkward, as it buries itself in the master boot record, so you have to fix that, after which a Malwarebytes Anti-Malware scan should find and get rid of the rest of it.

I'm not the best at explaining these things, but there are a few walkthroughs to remove Black Internet, such as these:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic322695.html

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1360060

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1358896

The Steampowered ones explain the method I used, and I am on XP SP3 if it matters.

Incidentally, I fixed my infection of it because my PC wouldn't boot (hung on 'Verifying DMI pool data'), which was fixed with 'fixmbr'. After it came back on I ran scans through habit and removed the infected loader.exe and other files. It wasn't until the next day that I discovered what I'd had.
 
haha, really? "If it was a person Id shoot it!"
But really, be careful of your browsing habits, and if the above dont work, Id personally run HijackThis and have a look at what it turns up. If your unsure post the log here and we can take a look at it for you.

http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/

For those that remember, what happened to merijn.org??
 
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