Thank You Malwarebytes

I don’t often “surf the ‘net", visiting unfamiliar sites. Most of my Internet access is in search of LAMP/RIA technical resources and answers, as well as contributing my own through this blog and on the appropriate sites.

Recently, I was checking a search engine for entries related to a site and I clicked on htxx:–aolpsycho.com-d-www.stkc.org (the xxs and -s are there to prevent it from being a real URL). It infected my computer with a nasty virus. Key filenames: brastk.exe, beep.sys, delself.bat, bnokdcme.exe, as well as others and registry corruption. It prevented execution of autoruns.exe, although renaming autoruns to a different name allowed it to run. It put a little red X image in the taskbar, prompting me to click to download ‘Antivirus2009′.

I won’t describe how the files were identified, or any of the other resolution tactics - to avoid assisting the authors. However, if it shows up on your computer, the posted link solved the problem on this machine very nicely.

Sincere thanks to the author and I will purchase a copy of the product.