New Virus Rampaging computers connected to steam

[H. Stone 1st MRB]

I was nailed today by a nasty AINSLOT virus, I have just spent three hours battling it, finally I have won the battle.

Be aware this virus attaches itself to new programs running on Steam- Steam is working to kill it as we speak, but if you have downloaded anything in the past few days 11/3/11- to present be warned you may have the bastard and not know.

Why are people assholes and make these things is beyond me, I do understand not all viruses are created that they could be just errors, but seriously this one was created by some asshat.

Anywhoo- Beware of the virus

[Yamagata 1st MRB]

How was this virus distributed, specifically? (how did you get it?)

What are the symptoms? (how did you know you had it?)

How did you get rid of it?

You can't just say look out for this virus and not give some additional info...

[Marsden 1st MRB]

ya i would like to know the specifics so i can watch for it myself.....

[Magoo]

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

This is on the Steam forums now. They have been down for a few days and now this message is all that is left. This probably has something to do with how accounts were being hacked.

Steam Forums website = http://forums.steampowered.com/forums

[H. Stone 1st MRB]

How the virus came. for me i downloaded an old program Battlegrounds 2. I thought it came from that website. then it wasn't from battle grounds the virus hit. I redownloaded all my steam games. TF2 seemd to take longer then usual to download. but i didnt think anything of it.

The virus was encrypted into the software package of TF2, Source SDK, DODS, and CSS. with the recent update. When I finally located the virus on my machine it was only in those files. I contacted steam and basically got the same message Magoo recieved which had nothing to do with the problem.

How this virus works- It basically changes registry codes and eventually manifests itself in all programs if not caught it can crash your computer, from what I am told. Ainslot virus has been around for some time it just needed someone to attach it to a hacked folder.

Symptoms- you computer will start to run sluggish. playing online will get affected- my ping went to 999 when i tried joining any server. I will drain your cpu and make that run incredibly slow. You will start to see things on your computer like system error, and graphics card errors, then have bad connections to anything web related. It can disable your virus scans and malware locators if you don't catch it in time. Luckily I have a bot running on my computer constantly tracking intrusions. which is how i found it the first time.

It self replicates which makes it that much harder to kill.

How to remove:

Three free software packages that do work- Malwarebytes for the small malware parts of the virus, Norton Eraser for the bigger parts, then finally Microsoft Security essentials. They all worked without interfering with one another.

There you go hope this helps anyone who gets this

[H. Stone 1st MRB]

One last thing

This is how you can find it also if you don't have fishing software:

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: Task Manager- open Processes- if you see a*32.exe that is the virus

[Berg 1st MRB]

One last thing

This is how you can find it also if you don't have fishing software:

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: Task Manager- open Processes- if you see a*32.exe that is the virus

if ther is a program cald "a*32.exe" or anything whit a *32.exe in it?

[H. Stone 1st MRB]

from what i know it is just " a 32*.exe"

This makes you think its the driver for your operating system- when it isn't dont just delete or close all 32*.exe files as they may be your computer operating system.