hkey.exe - Dangerous
hkey.exe
Jeff's Story:
My PC had gotten a bad rootkit that my ISP antivirus software (powered by McAfee) could not detect, nor could fix.
I sought a solution on the Internet and discovered your product and tried out the trial.
You quickly found the rootkit and SAVED my PC!
I haven't had any problems since, and I'm extremely grateful.
Manual removal instructions:
The worm also spreads through backdoors that the Beagle and Mydoom worms and the Optix family of backdoors install.
W32.Gaobot.AFW can act as a backdoor server program and attack other systems.
It attempts to kill the processes of many antivirus and security programs.
Attempts to steal the product ID for Windows, and the CD keys of some computer games.
Copies itself to %System%\hkey.exe.
Opens a randomly selected TCP port and sends a copy of itself to any process connecting to that port.
Connects to a remote IRC server and awaits commands from the remote attacker.
Attempts to copy itself to other computers through the following remote administrative SMB shares, using weak user names and passwords.
Copies itself and executes on any remote shares to which it successfully authenticates.
Schedules a Network job to run the worm on the remote system.
Manual removal:
Navigate to the keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices
and delete the value: "windows"="hkey.exe"