IE_Updater.exe caught my aunt's PC

[Lepard]

How can I get rid of the vast amount of trojans/viruses/spyware that her PC has?

I need to be able to salvage her pictures. But I have already told her that I am formatting it. It will take less time to get it up and running, then an actual cleaning. The problem lies in that, once the system is up and running I cannot open any windows. IE does not open. I tried putting a jumpdrive with some security software as well as Firefox and since I cannot access the disk, I cannot install none of it.

Safe mode does not work either.

Any tips or ideas to save these pics?

 

[xtknight]

Ubuntu LiveCD and mount the ntfs partition. Then copy them to a jumpdrive.

 

[Arkaign]

If you have good antivirus/antispyware on a spare PC, I'd just yank the drive and boot with it as a secondary drive (unplug your CD/DVD drive if necessary). Copy to a folder on your C:\ drive, then boot back up with your burner plugged in, burn the stuff off, and you're set.

 

[bruceb]

The photos should be easy to get off .. probably in the My Pictures folder
You can slave the drive in another pc to get to them safely
Also save the .pst files if she uses Outlook and if you are going to do a
reinstall, be sure you have all the Application CD's and the License Keys
for any programs ... It is a good idea to run Everest and also Belarc Advisor
.. print out the results of both ... they will tell you most, if not all of your
program registration codes ... after all is running ok, install a good Antivirus,
Spybot SD, Spyware Blaster, AdAwareSE Personal & Windows Defender
Make sure they run for real time protection and keep the definitions up to date
Also install SP2 for XP and make an Image of the stable system

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Ubuntu LiveCD and mount the ntfs partition. Then copy them to a jumpdrive.

:thumbsup:

This works great. I salvaged dozens of gigabytes worth of data off a friend's infected laptop with the Ubuntu LiveCD and my iPod.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: xtknight
Ubuntu LiveCD and mount the ntfs partition. Then copy them to a jumpdrive.

:thumbsup:

This works great. I salvaged dozens of gigabytes worth of data off a friend's infected laptop with the Ubuntu LiveCD and my iPod.

Yes, this is dead simple...much better and easier then slaving the HDD to another windows PC and risking getting that one messed up.

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: Arkaign
If you have good antivirus/antispyware on a spare PC, I'd just yank the drive and boot with it as a secondary drive (unplug your CD/DVD drive if necessary). Copy to a folder on your C:\ drive, then boot back up with your burner plugged in, burn the stuff off, and you're set.

Please no. I see the idea here, but as nweaver mentioned, you put your own machine at risk when doing this. There are many files that could be hidden, so when copying to a folder on your own hard drive you might accidentally copy the virus.

I once had one that sat in my temporary folder to burn CD's. I didn't realize until 3 backup DVD's in, that I was copying the virus to every single DVD. It's just scary sometimes what a virus/trojan.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Lepard
How can I get rid of the vast amount of trojans/viruses/spyware that her PC has?

I need to be able to salvage her pictures. But I have already told her that I am formatting it. It will take less time to get it up and running, then an actual cleaning. The problem lies in that, once the system is up and running I cannot open any windows. IE does not open. I tried putting a jumpdrive with some security software as well as Firefox and since I cannot access the disk, I cannot install none of it.

Safe mode does not work either.

Any tips or ideas to save these pics?

If you can get Safe Mode With Command Prompt, there's a technique halfway down John's malware-removal page that runs a manual McAfee scanner.

Tangentially, I'm sure you're planning to set her system up tighter. Consider some proactive, arbitrary prevention in addition to the usual stuff. A Limited user account is a good one if her software will cooperate (you can always try it, then change back if it doesn't work).

Also, if she isn't doing commercial/business work, just home-user stuff, then you might try free AOL Kaspersky and note how you can have it arbitrarily delete potentially-malicious email attachments by filetype as described there. I don't have to worry about my mom running a .EXE she got in her email (or a host of other potential bad ones) because they're going to be nuked on sight.