Computer Learning

[Cush]

Hi Guys. On Friday, my computer was attacked by something that downloaded through my net connection. I'm not sure whether it was something that had been sleeping in my system, or if it hit me through a site I was visiting.

I was in the HoopsHype site. I believe I used my mouse roller to scroll down the page. And then my cursor showed that it was busy. By the time I reduced a bunch of open windows, I found more than a dozen new icons on my desktop screen, and before I could do anything, my system crashed.

When I rebooted, I found numerous new program files throughout the system in Start-up, in Windows System, etc.

Exe Programs had names like Webrebates and SahHtml, and dozens of others.

I tried using uninstall, but the programs wouldn't uninstall without filling in forms (that I presume were going to transmit through my net connection). I had not reopened my net connection.

This thing had loaded icon links to Sex sites, Gambling sites, Bingo sites, Credit Card Application sites, etc., etc.

When I thought I'd deleted everything new in the system, I reopened the net and opened my IE browser. The browser seemed to have been corrupted, too. Any page that I look at that has a word like Sussex in it, there appears a highlighted link on the word sex in Sussex.

Back to searching my files and found Upload and Download exe files that I deleted. And maybe more - can't remember.

Plus a lot of the files I had deleted before had been reloaded.

Think I've cleaned it now, but my browser still has (what I think is) a new tool bar (that I've unchecked) called Begin2Search.com Bar.

And I'm getting an occasional pop-up that looks suspicious.

Anyone had experience with this?

Any suggestions for anything else that may be hiding in the system?

Any suggestions for how to avoid whatever this was?

Any suggestions for how to clean it up if it happens again?

Thanks, guys.

Cush