Viruses that mess with your internet connection?

[plastick]

i keep having trouble with my internet service right now... it keeps going on and off like every 3 minutes... on for about one minute and off for thre... it does this every now and then from day to day and the times vary in lenght.. i assumed that its my cable provider (Charter) working on stuff, but then I got the thought that it could be a virus.... I am not a computer noob, so I know what im doing with stuff and all I have for virus protection is the firewall on XP, and I've never had a virus before...

just thought Id ask, thanks

 

[John]

1) Do you have more than one pc? If so are they affected as well?
2) What are your cable modem up/down power & snr levels? If you don't know then call the cable company and post the details.
3) Reboot to safe mode w/ networking and see what happens.
4) I've seen spambots modify the original ndis.sys (located in c:\windows\system32\drivers) and it wreaks havoc. Some malware camouflage themselves as ndis.sys, particularly if they are located in c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 folder.
5) Run the Winsock fix
6) Run an F-Secure online scan

 

[plastick]

I have one pc and I use firefox for browser.
i dont know about the snr levels yet and i ran te fix tool just in case... i think it probably just is my provider, because i usually constantly have internet except on some week days it goes down and then comes back up for a span of time... its been connected now for the last 15 minutes which is the longest its stayed on during the last few hours, so maybe its okay now...

 

[John]

It's important to know your signal levels since the cabling/connectors/splitters in your home could also be a potential problem.

Down power should be between -8 & +8dB
Down snr should be higher than 30
Up power should be less than 55dB
Up snr should be higher than 30

You may be able to find some of these figures if you log into your cable modem. Otherwise call the cable co. and ask for them since you have a flaky connection.

 

[RiverDog]

Originally posted by: plastick
i keep having trouble with my internet service right now... it keeps going on and off like every 3 minutes... on for about one minute and off for thre... it does this every now and then from day to day and the times vary in lenght.. i assumed that its my cable provider (Charter) working on stuff, but then I got the thought that it could be a virus.... I am not a computer noob, so I know what im doing with stuff and all I have for virus protection is the firewall on XP, and I've never had a virus before...
just thought Id ask, thanks

Hate to tell ya but this is a firewall only. not AV protection. Try Spybot and see if it finds anything.

 

[grit621]

I only glanced through this post... sorry, time-challenged right now.

I've been dealing with a trojan (or some such thing) that shows up at svchost.exe (normally a ligit program) in task manager. It uses upwards of 75-100% of my CPU. It triggers when I run Internet Explorer. At that point, all of my internet apps (e-mail, web browser, etc), all respond slower than if I was running an old x8086 with a 300 baud modem (I just dated myself, huh?)

I haven't got a fix to work for it yet, but it's shown up on several computers. Might wanna check your task manager, sort by CPU useage, and see if that's it.