HDD Defragmenter Virus

HDD Defragmenter is not a real defrag tool but this thing gave me lots of trouble tonight. This is not a tool or anything else but instead is cleverly disguised virus that looks like Windows is having trouble.

How did I get HDD Defragmenter

WSell I still od not know how I got the HDD Defragmenter app but my daughter thinks that a web page dropped it onto my wifes laptop. What happened is that a window came up warning about 11 errors Detected! defragmentation is required.This makes no sense.

This message to me looked completely wrong so I started looking around the computer and got hit by a couple of Windows errors saying that there was a problem with my Ram and another saying that I was low on disk space

As I looked I could see that this HDD Defragmenter was a file in the temp folder under my wifes progiel on her computer and then I decided to run Super Antispyware (sounds like a virus but is actually a truly free spyware scanner) and then After about an hour of this and a couple of reboots I decided to reboot into safe mode.

Uninstalling HDD Defragmenter

So to uininstall HDD Defragmenter as I said I booted into Safe Mode. To get there I just hit F9 key a few times as the computer was rebooting and I got a screen asking me if I wanted safe mode, safe mode with networking, safe mode with command prompt. I just chose safe mode and strangely enough safemode came up without a task bar (Windows 7 problem or something else?). I hit alt+ctrl+delete and then I chose task manager from the menu, went to file –> run and typed in regedit.exe and hit enter to bring up the registry editor

The registry is fun and dangerous just like any power can be. I went to the spot hkey local machine\software\microsoft\windows\current version\run and saw nothing of note so I tried the next spot hkey current user\software\microsoft\windows\current version\run and in there I saw a file called 34453.exe and it was in a location within my wifes temp folder. I deleted that entry and the file that it pointed at in the temp directory (again no taskbar so I alt+tabbed to the task manager and went to file–> run and just typed c: and hit enter to get an explorer window up.

So after this I rebooted and the HDD Defragmenter in now gone. I hate how these viruses that masquerade as real tools screw up your machine. That was 2 hours messing around to get rid of HDD Defragmenter that I could have put to much better use.