Virus may have bricked my computer

Linc Davis wrote:

There hasn't been a verified report of a Flashback infection for almost a year now.

I don't have time to go through that entire list right now, but weren't they all the result of an old infection?

At least two A-V labs have declared it extinct, so unless it's started up again (highly doubtful IMHO), this would have to have been installed about a year ago. Could somebody go this long without noticing or running a Software Update? Hard to believe, but possible I guess.

In any case, we seem to have lost the OP in all this, so we may never know.

I don't have time to go through that entire list right now, but weren't they all the result of an old infection?

I don't know. The point is, it still turns up.

I suppose that a couple things that could explain it are restoring to old infected backups or using an infected computer that has been sitting on a shelf for a while. Still, the one definitive piece of information that we don't have yet is info about what Avast actually detected. Without that, we're just guessing.

shelbourn wrote:

worked like a charm first try.

So that's pretty much proof positive that you contracted Flashback malware at some point and there almost certainly are other components of it still on the hard drive. Be sure and run Software Update, as Linc advised which will hopefully take care of the rest, although I believe all the dangerous code is already gone or disabled.

Several of us are more than curious to know if it was infected last year or has there been a recent outbreak that none of us are aware of. The most useful information would be to discover the date of installation, but if Software Update tells you that malware was removed, that won't be possible. So if you could just let us know how long it had been since you updated the OS or if you had observed unusual behavior such as Safari crashing unexpectedly, that would still be useful.

Well, given that information, I have to concur with Linc that this is a Flashback infection. Was your friend using an alternate browser for a long time, since Safari wasn't working?

Honestly, given the condition of the machine, I wouldn't trust that Flashback is the only thing on it. There have been eight other malware families (that I can think of off the top of my head) since Flashback that were capable of installing through vulnerable versions of Java, and your friend's machine could be infected with any or all of them as well. I also wouldn't rely on any anti-virus software for a guarantee of cleaning it up. The only thing that I would do at this point, if it were my friend, is erase the hard drive and reinstall the system and all the applications from scratch. I wouldn't restore anything from backups except personal documents, and even then would only copy them back to the system manually. (I wouldn't let the system try to help you import from a backup after installing.)

Once you've recovered, I would advise that you and your friend both read my Mac Malware Guide to learn more about how to stay safe. I suspect you will need to help your friend with this, and in this circumstance, I would highly recommend (given past behavior) installing anti-virus software as an added layer to help protect him from himself. I would recommend using Sophos for that purpose, in this case.

That's nonsense.

Prove it please.

to get rid of whatever it thinks is still running, you could restart in Safe Mode (hold down Shift at Startup).

Or figure it will get installed with one of the later Updates when you re-install Mac OS X.

If the same update - Apple suggest running SU update while booted from another drive :

Learn what to do if you cannot install the SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0 .

> Or figure it will get installed with one of the later Updates when you re-install Mac OS X.

Since it's a firmware update, which are always hardware specific, I don't think they ever come with an OS update. Not as far back as I can recall.