Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support | I had the FS blues..

DVA10641
Assistant Chief Pilot, B757-200
OLP

Joined on March 29 2012
50 State Club
Globetrotter
Million Mile Club
US Mountaineer Club
US Coastal Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary
Flying Colonel
Online Fifteen Century
Everett 1500 Club
Events Quintuple Century Club

Rosemount, MN USA

1,987 legs, 4,456.2 hours
1,865 legs, 3,929.2 hours online
1,967 legs, 4,422.4 hours ACARS
638 legs, 1,290.5 hours event
18 legs dispatched, 157.2 hours

Posted onPost created on October 28 2013 21:50 ET by Jason Boche

PC viruses and malware are getting more complex.

Last night after getting home late from the football game I was checking out Viking fan forums and I picked up a nasty piece of ransomware either from someone's signature or a banner ad on the site. Either way I knew immediately when it hit, not because McAfee caught it - it didn't, but because I happened to have task manager up. I saw roughly 15-25 dllhost.exe processes launch. Suffice to say I couldn't get rid of them and then the dialogue box about entering my credit card or else the FBI gets involved popped up.

I fought it for about an hour last night and then gave up & went to bed.

I tried a combofix.exe on it this morning before heading to the office. No dice.

I was pretty bummed the whole day as I knew I was facing a 10 hour re-install of FSX plus all the add on scenery, airports, aircraft, etc. ugh. I had the FS blues.

After getting home I put 3 more hours into it. After several safe mode boots, Avast, CClean, MalwareBytes, TrendMicro Fake Antivirus Remover, msconfig startup tweaks, IE config restore, and doing some research on HTML:Script-inf, I finally got rid of it.

Good riddance to McAfee. It's more of a pain than it was ever worth. I only used it because I had a 3 computer subscription from when I purchased my wife's laptop last year. Going the Avast route now. Seems much better.

See you in the skies. Without my dllhost.exe baggage.
Jas

Jason Boche

Assistant Chief Pilot, B757-200

DVA5270
Senior Captain, B737-800

Joined on September 27 2007
50 State Club
Everett 500 Club
Online Quintuple Century Club
Nine Century Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary

"p=np"
Charleston, SC USA

977 legs, 1,725.8 hours
578 legs, 894.1 hours online
931 legs, 1,647.1 hours ACARS
43 legs, 67.0 hours event

Posted onPost created on October 28 2013 22:03 ET by Don Thomas

Jason....I pickup up one a couple of weeks ago.

I paid to have the viruses removed. It did, however, shut down IE. I have switched to a different browser.

V-Route uses IE to download the routes it gnerates and FireFox will not work with V-Route. My Feelthere payware now causes FSX and FS9 to shut down.

Any Ideas on repairing IE and couuld Feelthere use code in IE to operate?

Don Thomas

Senior Captain, B737-800

DVA9716
First Officer, A330-300

Joined on April 26 2011
50 State Club
Century Club
Online Century Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary

"Take Offs are optional - Landing are mandatory!"
Killeen, TX USA

154 legs, 324.0 hours
102 legs, 218.1 hours online
153 legs, 321.7 hours ACARS
4 legs, 8.9 hours event

Posted onPost created on October 29 2013 11:02 ET by Kenneth Dickerson

So what is a good Virus Software. I had BitDeffender but I found it was causing me more problems than it was worth. So this weekend I purhcased Avast and installed it. It locked out my keyboard when I clicked on the "Safe Area". It went to my drivers and completely shut them out. It took me all afternoon to get my my system back up. Surfice it to say,, good bye AVAST. So what is a good but reasonable Anti Virus Software for us simmers?

Kenneth Dickerson

First Officer, A330-300

Posted onPost created on October 29 2013 14:10 ET by Jason Boche

Don Thomas wrote:

Jason....I pickup up one a couple of weeks ago.

I paid to have the viruses removed. It did, however, shut down IE. I have switched to a different browser.

V-Route uses IE to download the routes it gnerates and FireFox will not work with V-Route. My Feelthere payware now causes FSX and FS9 to shut down.

Any Ideas on repairing IE and couuld Feelthere use code in IE to operate?

Sorry to hear that. I hope you didn't pay too much or at least I hope the expense was worth the time it would have taken you to rebuild from scratch and of course the prevention of data loss.

Although I own the Wilco/Feelthere CRJs, I don't know if or how they rely on IE. I'd recommend talking to Wilco but I've seen their developer support and I'm not at all impressed with their attitude. I don't have any experience with Feelthere support. If you're a vendor and you have any brains, you'll support at least one other browser type than IE. Typically that's going to be Mozilla/Firefox.

As far as the crashing, what I've learned about FSX so far is that there are 101 or more ways to make it crash. Sorry I can't really help you there without more detail, and with that, I'd go straight to my favorite internet search engine: Google.

Kenneth Dickerson wrote:

So what is a good Virus Software. I had BitDeffender but I found it was causing me more problems than it was worth. So this weekend I purhcased Avast and installed it. It locked out my keyboard when I clicked on the "Safe Area". It went to my drivers and completely shut them out. It took me all afternoon to get my my system back up. Surfice it to say,, good bye AVAST. So what is a good but reasonable Anti Virus Software for us simmers?

To be honest, since you purchased Avast I would have stuck with it longer myself and worked the isolated issue you came across. I had good reason to ditch McAfee because I have accumulated a bulleted list of things that I'll just call insanely poor. I've also known McAfee since the mid 90's. I know it's heritage and it's pretty clear the direction that product is going, at least on the consumer front. I heard good things about Avast which is why I went to it and I like what I see so far.

Anti-virus sucks plain and simple but it's a cost of doing business, whatever your business is on the PC. Some packages do a good job, some don't. None are known to be perfect. The idea is to find the one that stinks the least. Any of them that are effective at intercepting malware are better than the alternative of infection. Removal of malware is nowhere as easy as it used to be with viri in the old days. In my opinion the emphasis should be on proactive protection rather than removal because once infected, all bets are off.

Jason Boche

Assistant Chief Pilot, B757-200

DVA8502
Captain, B757-200

Joined on April 13 2010
Double Century Club

"MOCHA HAGTDI."
Folkston, GA

251 legs, 575.3 hours
65 legs, 139.7 hours online
241 legs, 558.8 hours ACARS
2 legs, 4.6 hours event

Posted onPost created on October 29 2013 16:47 ET by Timothy Thomas

Malware bytes is good.

I use Norton 360, ive been told it sucks but I have never had a issue with it. I also have Microsoft Security essentials as a 2nd scanner witch is really good.

I waged war on the Google redirect virus a month or 2 ago. thoues 3 scanners plus Windows malicious software removal tool took care of the problem, alhoue it did take 2 days worth of scanning. all issues were removed. did the normal disk clean up and defrag after that and haven't had a issue since.

May I recommend you find the Sysinternals Suite. its a completely free set of tools a lot of people in the Tech world use it. specifically your looking for Process explorer. it does what PM does, but it lets you see a lot more of what's actually going on, and even trace it to a file location and look up info on the file online.

Timothy Thomas

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on October 29 2013 19:29 ET by Jason Boche

I've been a huge fan of Winternals/Sysinternals for the better part of 15 years back when Mark and Bryce were independent. I did use process explorer and in my particular infection case, dllhost.exe was process leveraged underneath explorer.exe - both of which belong to Windows and can't be nuked. They are a clever disguise which hide the real culprit. In this case, HTML:Script-inf which installs as an IE hook/add on and then calls malicious files it places in temporary internet files. Each appeared to be a random website that I believe it was trying to infect so that it would spread itself. Beyond the process of pro-creation, I haven't found anything malicious that it has done to my system but who knows.

Jason Boche

Assistant Chief Pilot, B757-200

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