The joy of Malware & AutoCAD 2013

In this interesting scenario, AutoCAD 2012 [standalone] was able to run but AutoCAD 2013 [standalone] started and a splash screen just came up and then disappeared.

The symptom basically points to this solution: TS15176093 so we deleted the .data file and we re-activated the software manually.  AutoCAD 2013 launched but when we exited the program and re-started it the second time, the behaviour came back.  

Finally, we even checked out the productinformation.pit file and everything seemed to be in order as well.

I love using Procmon to find out why crashes or errors happen and when I checked out the second last acad.exe and I found out that the problem was with some interesting malware.

You have either 2 choices at this time, try to eliminate by Googling it on the internet or reformat and re-install Windows.  I prefer the latter choice as you can never trust if you actually removed the malware on your computer.

Thanks to Rodney Robertson for sharing his experiences with the community.

Reference:

http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2011/10/general-systems-the-basics-of-using-process-monitor.html

Comments

[Stefan]

Nicely done!

[SUMPC]

Good work there! Very interesting. Keep it up