What kind of Virus turned my Spywareguard off ??

last night I was trying to access an cd/dvd forum. I was having problems logging in, when a PopUp appeared from "Spywarestormer". It (falsely)advertised that "Microsoft Internet Explorer" thinks I may have some spyware installed, " click the link" for more info.

I stupidly clicked the darn link, because I wanted to find out who was behind this intrusion, and drop the url into Nortons Ad Trashcan.

Minutes after clicking, I found that my IE favorites were not working, and when going to the Favorites Folder under My Documents, I found that a subfolder along with more folders and hundreds of text files, jpg files, word files, and notepad files no longer worked. They all had 0 kb listed as size. I had been using these files all day, right up until the time I clicked on that link.

Besides having Norton's Firewall installed and running - I then ran Norton anti-virus, spybot, adaware, trend micro anti virus, nortons
online virus check and security check.

Only Adaware found a problem, two "data miner" problems. When I went to check the logfile from Spywareguard, I found that the real time scanning engine had been turned off, and I did not do it ( cross my heart)

Anybody know what kind of virus, worm, or trojan ( javascript? ) could cause this.
What do I do to prevent this from happening again.
Thankfully I had a recent backup of the files on an external hard drive

THANKS, Robert

 

HI rxtian....

welcome to forums...

Here is some info, not flattering I am afraid, but you already probably knew that.

I cannot answer regarding if this turned off SG or not, will take your word for that.

http://www.webhelper4u.com/scams/spywarestromer.html

Cheers, TAS

 

TAS : thanks for the reply. I had seen that info on spywarestormer yesterday. From my search, I had expected to find info that this misleading popup was the cause of my problems. I have found no such concrete evidence as yet.

Although I really hate popup ads that are bascically come-ons (perhaps Microsoft would be interested in the misuse of their name) I am wondering if the page it sent me to had been hacked. Maybe some kind of java script was encountered. I don't know, I am a real amateur at this stuff.

I mentioned Spywareguard, because as I went thru the litany of running all my anti-virus and spyware apps, I looked down at the system tray at the Spywareguard icon, and saw that it what looked like a red X thru it. I found the Real Time Scanning Engine was disabled. Even though Spywareguard hasn't had an update in a long time, every so often I do check the log for any activity, and I check to make sure that all the options are turned.

Meanwhile, I will continue to look for the reason that one subdirectory of files in "My Documents" was affected. I find it strange that the file names weren't deleted, just the data. I am assuming that is what happened, because all the files had 0 kb listed as size