hlmichel Loc: New Hope, Minnesota

Started having issues yesterday. Constantly grinding hard drive and unresponsive programs.
Lightroom was freezing up and PS was slowing down.

Frustrated by the behavior of my system I checked the processes in Task Manager. Several instances of chrome were spiking CPU usage.

I no longer have chrome installed in my system, though. Each instance of Chrome was actually a strange program with an odd name.
Going into the Performance Monitor revealed that the chrome processes were hitting my CPU pretty hard, but also doing the same to my harddrive as well as sending and receiving from the net.

Further, my desktop icons were going back and forth between their normal look and default windows icons. It was as if something was messing with my file associations.

The Event viewer suggested problems with Side by Side--a Samsung galaxy program. I uninstalled that along with Kies.
I also noted issues with the Google installer service having issues--but I don't have chrome.
I uninstalled Google Earth for good measure.

Back in the process viewer, I traced the strange chrome process to its folder. It was in an oddly named subfolder in Appdata/Locallow/adobe. Actually there were several interesting folders contained in adobe, including one that held a replica of the windows folder structure. Desktop, Documents and some of the others.

I consulted a help forum and tried out a few malware scanners. No results.
Windows Security Essentials was no help either.

I finally came across the ESET online scanner which remove Win32 Kryptic.COUT from my computer and killed a handful of processes running in memory.

Now the computer is quiet once more.

Two things bother me though. Windows Security Essentials seems barely useful. I really need to pony up for something a bit more robust.

Also, actually getting the Trojan. I didn't visit many sites yesterday, and I believe that's when I was hit. Model Mayhem, Ugly Hedghog, Facebook and Netflix. The event viewer shows that I got a critical update yesterday, but windows update shows that I simply got a definition update.

Strange....

Morrisdh Loc: Pisgah Alabama

Malwarebytes Anti-Virus will do the trick. mdh

twowindsbear

Maybe the NSA was looking at your computer?

hlmichel Loc: New Hope, Minnesota

Lol. Not sure what they'd want with me. Other than a few casual google searches for Morpheus and the matrix....perhaps I've said too much.

I just find it interesting that the problem originated in an adobe folder. And my adobe programs were the only ones suffering from slow-downs during the ordeal. Even after getting my system clean, Lightroom continues to be sluggish. May have to uninstall and reinstall. I may even just trash everything and start from scratch on a freshly formatted hard drive.

And now that I think about it, though it may be a knee-jerk reaction, it's time to start changing passwords.
There was quite a bit of data sent out and quite a bit received while my computer was infected.

SNicker317 Loc: North NJ

Malwarebytes is excellent at removing malware, but I don't believe it's an anti-virus. You'll still need an anti-virus. Not sure whats good these days, but Avast used to be good and the basic program is free. Still worth running Malwarebytes to clean any website junk you've acquired.

hlmichel Loc: New Hope, Minnesota

Finally got off my lazy ass and installed Malwarebytes and Avast. I may switch to Eset as I've heard some good things about it.

Right now I'm using the free editions but may switch to paid versions.

The push came when I noted more disk activity late the other night. I viewed the system logs and, among the other errors, Windows defender detected a trojan.

It did nothing about the trojan, just informed me it was there. Malwarebytes found the same nasty and removed it for me as well.

SNicker317 Loc: North NJ

Glad to hear things have taken a turn for the better... :)