Hello all, this is my first post....sorry if I should have introduced myself elsewhere on the forum first, but with this matter I'm sure I can be forgiven for dispensing with such protocols. I'll also apologise now for the long post coming your way, but I thought it time for you all to 'hear' a happy ending concerning Win32:Vitro and the wonderful (and free!) Avast! program.
It seems Vitro is no longer making ALL the headway in this war. Avast surely cured me when it caught it early enough. To cut a VERY long story a *tiny* bit shorter
, I was ravaged by Vitro on my PC. It has three HDD's - the system disk and two storage drives with just .AVI and .MP3 files respectively. That's to say the SYSTEM disk was ravaged, as my two storage drives seemed fine and there were no .exe files on them (at least I thought so then). I never had Avast! at this point, and AVG, Malwarebytes and Superantispyware never detected any viruses at all.....but I KNEW I had a BAD virus as my OS was QUICKLY getting eaten away to the point that I just logged on to a black screen...i.e. a completely destroyed operating system. So I formatted/re-installed FOUR times....but this unknown and insanely destructive virus was still there.....I had to watch my OS get eaten away again four times in a row. It since turns out it was my backups on a USB flash drive that kept re-infecting my system disk with what I now know was Win32:Vitro. So I employed the scorched earth policy....I disconnected the two storage drives from my motherboard, as I suspected they were not infected and I wanted them to stay that way. I rebooted, used Darik's Boot n' Nuke to overwrite the full system drive with 0's, re-installed XP, and as I had now suspected an infected flash drive, I never tried to put it back in and was prepared to forgo the back-ups and lose my stuff. My system now seemed fine, but I thought I'd try Avast! to see what it was like and to see if that found anything. So I installed Avast.
Avast! updated to the latest definitions and I set about scanning. It found nothing.....and my OS was seemingly back to normal. Great. However, I *really* wanted the files off my 16GB USB drive....so, with faith in Avast!, I took a chance and put it back in my machine. I IMMEDIATELY scanned it.......and low and behold it found several instances of the Win32:Vitro virus on the many .exe files belonging to various programs I wished to re-install. So I let Avast! put them all in the chest for the time being. Then, after some research on just how nasty Vitro can be, I decided I would forgo the contents of the USB drive and let Avast! delete the infected files from the chest. After that I re-formatted the flash drive and also used the flash 'Disinfector' utility to make sure it was clean. I rebooted the PC with the drive still attached and left it in...in fact it is still in now, days later, and both it and my PC are clean of Vitro. SO....that is at least one instance of Avast! detecting the virus and quickly and successfully deleting it before it could re-infect anything else. So good on you Avast!?
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BUT.....was it Avast that kept the USB drive clean or the Disinfector tool? Or was it a combination of the two? Well, here's the answer: As I was still convinced my two disconnected SATA storage drives were clean, I plugged them back into my mobo, the ones with Avi's and MP3's I mentioned earlier, and immediately scanned them both. Avast! reported that the one with the MP3's was totally clean....BUT the one with the Avi's had hidden 'System Information' and 'Recycler' folders, and in the latter was two Win32:Vitro infected .exe files that must have cheekily found their way there. So....I simply let Avast! delete them and carried on as normal.
That was over two days ago now and all is fine and dandy....so I now know that while Disinfector could possibly have helped a bit with the flash drive, it was DEFINITELY Avast!, and only Avast! that did ALL the detective work....and only Avast that I let delete the Vitro viruses from my infected storage drive. My system has been switched on constantly since then, I've done numerous Avast! scans, nothing whatsoever has been found, and Windows XP is as fit as a fiddle.
While earlier in this thread people spoke of Avast! finding Vitro but being unable to remove it, that is apparently not the case here. Perhaps it is starting to win the war? Obviously I benefited from immediate detection and removal of just a handful of Vitro infected files, as I had a clean system disk and OS at this point.....but the fact remains that Avast! found a load of Vitro infected .exe's on my flash drive and deleted them all before it could leap anywhere else, and then did the same with the two infected .exe files on my big SATA storage drive.
I know for a fact I'm clean of Vitro now...the OS is working perfectly fine and I can access and update all the security websites that were blocked by Vitro while I was infected. I can also update Malwarebytes and Superantispyware that I couldn't do while infected with Vitro (for all the good they are....as out of those two, AVG and Avast!, only Avast has even found it and named it...let alone kill it).
So I just want to say thank you to the folks at Avast! for being the only one on the market to fight this menace. It seems Symantec, AVG and McAfee don't want to talk about it, let alone try and fight it. Thank you Avast! And I sincerely hope I'm not the last with this menace who has a happy ending.....even if they have to employ a format/install tactic at some point.
Thanks for reading.