>>Hi everybody,
>>
>>I have my laptop running normally in the morning.
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>>When I returned in the evening and checked it, I see lots of words (such as application, for example) underlined now with weird popup messages trying to send me to some shopping sites.
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>>What should I do to get rid of it? I have Trend Micro OfficeScan which I am running now.
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>>What else should I do?
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>>Thanks a lot in advance.
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>>I see this problem right now only on MSDN forums. I am going to verify if this is indeed the case or the problem appears in other sites. I do not see the problem in UT messages.
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>>I opened IE (normally I use Google Chrome) and I saw weird new home page.
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>>Here is what I see in IE (I restored my home page, but there is now some stupid toolbar).
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>>How can I clean my laptop from this virus?
>>
>>Thanks in advance.
>>
>>UPDATE. Spent about 2 hours cleaning my laptop from that malware. I think I am clean now.
>
>The most important thing is to figure out how you got infected ("Muvic Toolbar"). There's either a hole in your security or you or someone else did something ill-advised with your computer.
>
>These days the most likely vector is installing a "free" 3rd party utility like a PDF creator etc. and failing to notice that by default the installer also installs junk like this. It would be a good idea to check your Programs and Features for any other unknown software that might have been installed.
>
>If you attach that computer to a corporate network you should inform the sysadmin and follow corporate policy.
>
>These days if something gets installed on your computer, either via a vuln or through social engineering, it's very easy for the installer to include multiple malicious payloads such as rootkits, keyloggers etc. If you need to trust the machine you may be better off wiping it and installing from your most recent known good image backup.

My boss keeps criticizing me for "wasting time" on "nonsensical" tasks such as creating HDD images of all the workstations on a periodic basis (a task that takes me a few hours to complete -- usually done on off hours). This is even after having demonstrated on numerous occasions where the only way that I was able to restore a system back to proper operating condition was by utilizing a backup image (though with a loss of some data). I do understand that while performing such tasks that I am NOT performing what I was hired to do (software development), and that I should be *really* be handing this to the company IT staff...
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oh wait... that's me.