[bass1702]

OK, Get this. 6 Computers of different brands, models etc. all over my city...have experienced the unknown. I am completely stumped and so are my other Level 3 Senior Techs. None of us have EVER seen this happen before.

I have included a list of details as to what had happened to all of the computers. I will continue to research and try to figure out what happened and how it happened. question is, where to begin.


All computers suffered the following:

computers running normally

out of nowhere, between 9am and 12pm on October 7, 2009, programs started to not respond (programs such as IE, MSOffice, Start Menu's, etc.)
System started lagging suffering Excrusiating slowness
Computers are rebooted
Upon login, full startup and idle takes at least an hour to complete (sometimes wouldnt complete at all as processors are maxed out)
Once completed, task manager>Performance shows all cores/processors maxed out steadily at 100% and not moving
No one opened any emails or downloaded anything. Just normal everyday tasks.
No extra software/processes were found to be running. Just normal everyday stuff, yet processors were maxed out.
Everday programs such as Microsoft Word take over an hour to open
Start menu stakes 7-15 minutes to open
msconfig would not open in order to set configuration to Diagnostic Mode. it was Unsuccessfully completed.
No errors or warnings are given as to malware, spyware, viruses, and so on.
Between 11am and 12pm on October 8, 2009, all computers return to normal and are functioning normally, as if nothing ever happened.

Operating Systems vary from Windows XP to Windows Vista. All computers have different motherboards and processors. No computer is alike in any way. My Computer is one of the 6 that this happened to. All I had open was a Chat room that I have open every day, Windows Media Player, and yahoo messenger. i have an ASUS Motherboard with an AMD Phenom II Quad Core Processor and 8G of RAM. Have NEVER had any problems. All Security Software is up-to-date and working properly...even on the other machines.

That is all I know. all Computers affected showed the exact same signs and symptoms and all computers returned to normal at the same time. I was unable to access security logs and other logs as I had to reformat my computer in order to get back online to begin research.

All Security Logs and other logs on the other machines check out normal. Nothing amiss or abnormal. As if nothing ever happened.

If ANYONE knows about this...or knows what COULD have caused this mysterious systematic problem...please...help me out. I have no idea where to begin my research. When the computers returned to normal...no further damage was aquired. everything was perfect.

Thanks a million!

Chris S.

[Nubbleet]

Sounds like a some sort of virus. Did you visit any sites out of the norm that you could have gotten something from? Are the computers linked in anyway?

[Osiris]

Are you able to access safemode and run malwarebytes and hijackthis?

[Burninator]

I'm with Nubleet. Sounds like it may be a virus. I would check out Osiris's Spyware Asylum. Spyware Asylum

[bass1702]

There are 6 computers total that suffered this problem.

3 (leasing office) are networked

1 (mine) on my own network

2 (customers) on their own networks as well.

No link at all. except for we share the same ISP. Which ive already contact them. Everything is normal. No Security Threats, no outages, no nothing.

As far as a virus goes....when the computers came back up today at around noon....we all ran virus scan. nothing was found. firewall reported nothing out of the ordinary or of concern.

We ran HiJackThis and nothing out of the ordinary there either.

All we know...is at the same time, all computers went down....going excrusiatingly slow, processors were maxed out. No abnormal processes running or anything. its unexplainable. and then 24 hours later...at the exact same time...all 6 computers return to normal. as if nothing ever happened.

[Osiris]

What program are you using to scan for spyware with? Do you know how to read hijackthis log?

[Mak213]

Are you sure it isnt Confiker?

[bob442]

sounds like virus to me as well..

are you using anything like group policy ?

[QuaziBee]

I'm sure Osiris is already thinking this.

I would put money on your computer being used in a Botnet attack on somebody.

Botnet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[BonzNumber1]

are the computers randomly restarting aswell like once per day or locking up compleetly for like 30 sec intervals?