Richard Thomas Infinite Player

I knew something was up with my daughter's PC, it was doing odd things bogging down, and she was having problems with her AOL instant messenger. I had disabled some programs previously and knew I had to clean them up. So I ran the virus scan which had the latest virus files, and found nothing. I ran Spybot Search and Destroy it found a bunch of adware etc.. Got that all removed. The programs said it was all clean. But something was still up. I delved a little deeper I looked at the list of processes running I saw one that did not look familiar. One must be careful because you don't want to kill a vital process.

So I looked for the folders containing the program then I knew it did not belong it was in an odd place in the file structure and the files in these folders had names that no legitimate programmer or company would use. So I went in and killed the process. Then I went to delete the folder. It wouldn't let me. So I went in and deleted each individual file in the folder during this time the virus scanner popped up this program was going out to a web site and trying to load a Trojan.

The virus program quarantined it. It was like it was trying to save itself. After I deleted the individual files I was able to delete the folder. But soon as I deleted the folder something recreated it much to my surprise. I went back to the list of processes and something had started up the process again, now I was getting frustrated. The only thing that could do that would be another program. So I found the other one. To make a long story short there were three programs working in concert protecting each other. Attempting to load Trojans. Finally I killed all three processes in quick succession, deleted the files and folders for each program and it was gone. None of the other PCs in the house had them at least I think. I should have written down the names of the programs.

I turned spybot's Search and Destroys full immunization on, everything has been good so far. But I wonder who built these three stealth programs that downloaded Trojans but didn't show up on in the virus scanner or spybot. How did they elude them? How many home PC's are there out there that have been compromised bogged down and slow? Some of these programs can grab your Quicken and other account data and send it out. Could someone use these programs to shut the Internet down or stop the free flow of information?

Is there a silent war going on that we don't know about? Was it a foreign government? Our own? Or just some talented High School kids that somebody should be employing and giving them something worthy to do?