Meth Mouth? malware?

July 25, 2006 8:02 AM

Has anyone heard of a computer virus/worm/trojan that causes a photo of someone's rotten teeth (meth mouth) to pop up at startup and occasionally?

This is on a computer at my Dad's business, used primarily by an employee. I haven't seen it, he just emailed me about it yesterday. Apparently the photo takes up the whole screen, and there is no window or border (it's not visibly in a browser window). He mentioned "It is supposedly called “meth mouth” and it was passed around on the internet" but I'm not sure how he knew that.
Google and Symantec.com searches turned up nothing.

posted by bradn to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Your dad might be a victim of a byteverify exploit, which can be modified to alter the Windows splash screen. A similar incident occurred in April, but with an ersatz BSOD screen in place of the image you described.
posted by Smart Dalek at 9:14 AM on July 25, 2006

Thanks, it looks like Ad-Aware might be the answer, if that is the problem. It seemed a little more malicious than most malware so I thought I would ask here first.
posted by bradn at 12:53 PM on July 25, 2006

Try Spybot, as well, but note that if such a program changed the splash image, simply removing the program may well not set the image back to default -- I wouldn't expect it would, in fact.
posted by baylink at 1:16 PM on July 25, 2006