Grr. Last night I noticed that my parents’ computer (using Windows XP) was running really slow, so I went to the Task Manager, which showed that CPU usage was at 100%. Yikes. And then today, I was getting dialog boxes that would give me a minute to save data (gee, thanks) before the computer would shut down and restart automatically. Well, after some internet searching, I narrowed it down to something called the Sasser worm:
If your computer is infected with W32.Sasser.worm, you may see a dialog box with text that refers to LSASS.exe. Some customers whose computers have been infected may not notice the presence of the worm at all, while others who are not infected may experience problems because the worm is attempting to attack their computer. Typical symptoms may include systems rebooting every few minutes without user input.
I followed their instructions, and everything seems fine… for now. We hates the nasty wormses.