A Linux experiment gone horribly…perfect!

“The other day someone who knows I am in the computer business
came to me with a very sick laptop (Gateway W340 with Intel
graphics chip and Broadcom wireless). The machine was a fairly
innocuous little guy that had some serious issues. I’ll list them
out:

* The operating system was Windows Vista (he did not want to
shell out the money for Windows 7).
* There was a root kit.
* Numerous malware issues.
* Chock full ‘o viruses.
* Wireless was flaky (at best).
* Machine was horribly slow (presumably because of the above).

“My usual first steps are to boot into safe mode, run Combofix,
run CCleaner, boot back into regular mode, run Malwarebytes, and
then run the antivirus. After this was all complete the remaining
symptoms were:”

Complete
Story