For quite a while now, my web-browser suddenly started up trying to get to the page http://update.windowsettings.org. I knew I must have had a virus or something, but since this happened quite rarely, I always closed the window and continued my work. Today, however it was a rainy day, I had nothing else to do, so I tried to find some cure to this.
I was really surprised to see that there is not much information on this. The only thing close to this was some discussion on this thread. I did not actually find the real cause of the problem, because there was only one over-confident guy nagging around about stuff that he knows and not actually solving the problem (all hail to the almighty geek 😛 ). I did my own Free virus-scan and I have located all of my potential viruses on the PC. I simply killed any instances of my virus collection currently running among the processes and then removed all of the viruses themselves by hand. All of them were located in my “My Documents” folder, all hidden.
Then I returned to the above mentioned thread, to see if any of my viruses were in the scan-report of the “geeks victim”. Surprise, surprise I have found two potential candidates:
- intelOP.exe
(Hoax.Win32.Renos.vavt) - MediaTubeCodec_ver1.1463.0[1].exe
(Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Zlob.wyt)
Of course I can not be sure, but I think these are the viruses responsible for popping up my browser window. I could only check if the problem still persisted, so I did a restart of my PC. I happily noticed that after the restart my browser was not started up again, searching for the hated address (before every time I started my computer, this has happened).