PC is infected, tips please?

RyanF

RyanF

RyanF

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Joined
22 Dec 2013
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Hi, so I was a bit dumb dumb last night and connected to a TS server that asked me to update a driver on my PC in order to connect to the server. Like an idiot I obliged and since then my Steam account was stolen by a Russian and a Latvian has tried to access my Hotmail.

I've currently got my PC running a McAfee full threat scan and a Malware ANti-Bytes full scan to try and remove it all, so the optimist in me is hoping that when I get home from work it'll all be sorted.

The pesimist in me says it'll find nothing and I'll still be in deep **** when it comes to doing anything on my PC when I get home. I've changed all the passwords I can think of (email, PayPal, Amazon, OcUK, Barclays etc.) on my work PC so no chance of them being taken again. I've got a ticket open with Steam Support to get my account back, the account is locked at the moment so hopefully nothing is gone - Worst case scenario it takes them a day or two to get any items back.

Anyone got any tips on removing all this junk? As a last resort I could completely reformat my two HDDs and re-install Windows 7 over the current installation on my SSD to go back to the beginning; would just be a pain in the ass updating everything again.
 
as others have said the best way to stop access or anything like that is to do a fresh install.

if you cant do this then I normally use malwarebytes which I find quite good at removing stuff.

before running malwarebytes I normally disable and remove restore points for system restore as stuff can come back from there after removed.
 
Prevention is always better than the cure :D

But yeah, probably best to just start afresh and be more careful in future I guess.
 
Once it's set back up how you like it, install Macrium Reflect and take a system image.

Get in the habit of doing these on a weekly/monthly basis.

It basically creates an image (think of it like a big zip file) of your PC, you can boot from a Macrium Reflect CD and then restore your PC using this image file.
 
Yeah, I'm going to CCleaner to wipe the two HDDs, as for my SSD would just reformatting it from the Windows 7 installation wizard (I'll use a bootable USB disk) work?

Haven't really got any critical data, it's mainly just hundreds of gigs of games :rolleyes:
 
USB windows 7 install will be fine, its how I do my installs as I have no CD\DVD drive even use it for 8.1 and installed developer preview of 10 using it as well.
 
All done, wiped the two HDDs and just used the format option in Windows 7 installer. Going to run a scan again tomorrow just to be sure but have now got everything back how I wanted it. Will be sure to check out that imager program as well as that will definitely be useful in future.

Just gotta hope Valve can get me my Steam account and inventory back.. It's so stupid, I needed a code sent to my email to log in to my Steam profile on the same IP and PC that I was logged into 5 minutes earlier, purely because I reinstalled Steam. A random guy on the other side of the world however, can simply log onto my account and change the email address without needing any sort of confirmation from my email? >_<

Cheers guys :)
 
Was a post in PC games section about lost account that had Steam Guard enabled. So curious how they get around it, if they didn't obtain access to your e-mail.
 
You won't need to format all the drives. Just format the drive with windows install on it and reinstall windows. Probably easier if you don't know how to clean this sort of thing and make sure its gone. These days even all the virus scan tools won't solve it.

Definitely reset all your email passwords and all your other passwords.
 
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