I decided to resurrect this thread because now I'm not sure if this is even isolated to just Skype. I just powered up my laptop today which has never had issues and the same exact thing is happening to my Google Chrome browser. I launch Chrome and then a chrome.exe runs at 1,500 K usage and idles at about 50 CPU for a while.
Whatever this is I'm pretty pissed off. I've not used a USB device on my laptop in a very long time, so I'm not thinking I've spread it that way. Whatever this is, I'm thinking it has network spreading capabilities and it targets random apps that are most used on the device/system.
I've concluded that I'm formatting every damn device. I'm going to wipe a huge 2 TB external to back up all of my files and to keep this hell torched demon of a worm in the grave, I won't be using the external anywhere except for on my soon-to-be Fedora systems. Screw Windows hard, tempered glass Windows with porcelain... ahahahaaaa. I wonder if anyone will get that? If you have any understanding of physical security, you should.
I was hoping to be able to get this into the AV database so other people can be protected from this, because this thing is quite nasty from what I'm seeing... but it appears that people just want to do the standard old school annoying tests which include doing a basic scan of services, startup files and such. If someone made it a goal to avoid those scans, what helps then? None of those typical old school scanners that appear ancient and ignore newer types of malicious software that behave much differently and hide themselves in other ways.
What if the infectious software automatically deleted the log files people request here and even more importantly, what if the infectious software disallowed these scanners from running or working properly? I could probably do it without a whole lot of effort. Also, relying on all of these third party softwares to diagnose issues is somewhat laughable as I don't think they're all open source, forgive me if I am wrong. Anyways, thanks all for trying to help out... but Windows just sucks too bad for my interest. I used to be a Windows fanboy, now I'll gladly flush it down the toilet. After all, they have indirectly(accidentally) flushed me and the potential confidentiality, integrity and availability of my system right down the poop shoot. I will enjoy a computer lifestyle without living in fear of being the 80% of computer users that are approximately.
"Windows XP is considerably more prone to malware infection than newer operating systems, Microsoft has said."
Well this is what I say, Windows totally sucks and no matter what special "security" issues they add, they suck and all they do eventually is lock your damn system down to a dog in the cage. They just can't get security right, it is either overkill stupid(still penetrable) or lackluster and vulnerability prone in just about every orifice. My OS will not be a dirty slave... soon. xD
Meanwhile my trustworthy Windows just told me that wiping my 2 TB drive would take 7 minutes, which not many minutes ago it said 7 hours. *shakes head*
While I'm at it, didn't you love those 99% finished downloaded files in dreadful internet explorer. Not to mention Microsoft's own website not working in their latest version of Internet Explorer. And I don't even need to finish off this 4 letter acronym B***. No one likes those ugly blue screens that look freaky. Every time that screen comes up I get some sort of rush wondering if it will be a half hour before I get things started back up or if it will just behave and start back up normally.
How much I will miss Windows: 0%, I will no longer have a toy of an operating system, but a system that works well as a production environment.
Here is an example of how horribly sucky Windows is: Let's say you have a web server up and running with PHP?? If there is any exploit in that and your server allows for connecting to RDP without being prompted for login before seeing the login screen. If you're able to clone cmd.exe to sethc.exe = shift 5 times and now you're into a command prompt window with system level access. What kids created Windows? Seriously...