The main thing was that what I was using to protect my computer gave me a false sense of security. Avast did give pop-up warning messages to show some things were being blocked, but it might as well have announced "Your computer is going to be extremely messed up, and there's nothing Avast can do to stop it."
I'm still not exactly sure what malware/virus was installed (it seemed different than what was described:
https://blog.malwarebytes.org/exploits-2/2015/07/neutrino-ek-leverages-latest-flash-0day/ ), but it had something to do with CryptoWall 3.0 and explorer.exe... as I was trying to clear things off, I did notice a file displayed Asian (probably Korean) text in the Windows Explorer description area. I should have written down the 2 IPs that were being blocked over and over by Avast... I remember one started with 33.?.?.?, but that could pretty much point to anything.
The only thing I really would use Adobe Flash for is to watch videos or play Flash games. The time and aggravation of going through the "computer redoing" process doesn't make either of those activities worth it, and I'm not going to reinstall Adobe Flash. I used to create simple, website animations using Flash while doing website development, but I'm no longer going to use Flash for anything. While it isn't perfect yet, HTML5 is good enough for videos (like on YouTube) and some of the things Flash could do. While it could've been other things that caused the malware/virus problem, it definitely sounds like Adobe Flash created the security hole. There used to be tons of plug-ins back in the Netscape browser days... most of their usefulness disappeared as browsers improved. Just like the Java plug-in, the Adobe Flash plug-in will be uninstalled from most users' browsers because of the constant security problems the plug-ins create.
After I'm all done with the reinstall/reconfiguration/setup, I'll look into making a clone (ghost image) of the drive (
any suggestions on the best application to use for this would be appreciated)... then, if something major happens, the redoing process shouldn't take nearly as long... just the updates for Windows 7 took hours to download and install... that was something like 180 Windows 7 updates. I did already have most of my files already backed-up off of my computer, so I can just transfer things over when things are finally setup.
I'm curious what others would try if this happened to your computer... what steps would you take and what programs would you use to try and fix the problem (remove the virus/malware and restore the computer to how it was before the infection)?
