Why Does My Computer Go To Conduit.com On Explorer Start-up

Computer Viruses: How does the SHORTCUT Virus in windows spread and who is the creator of this notorious, albeit highly resilient, virus?

How does the SHORTCUT Virus in windows spread: USB-borne malware is extremely common, and most malware that propagates via USB and other removable drives traditionally has taken advantage of the Windows Autorun or Autoplay feature.This strain of malware leveraged a vulnerability in the method Windows uses for handling shortcut files.Shortcut files — or those ending in the “.lnk” extension — are Windows files that link (hence the “lnk” extension) easy-to-recognize icons to specific executable programs, and are typically placed on the user’s Desktop or Start Menu. Ideally, a shortcut doesn’t do anything until a user clicks on its icon. But it was found that these malicious shortcut files are capable of executing automatically if they are written to a USB drive that is later accessed by Windows Explorer.“So you just have to open infected USB storage device using [Windows] Explorer or any other file manager which can display icons (for i.e. Total Commander) to infect your Operating System and allow execution of the malware,”“rootkit” files are used to  hide the malware itself so that it remains invisible on the USB storage deviceI think it was called W32.Stuxnet | Symantec. You can click on this link and see the each and every technical details about the virus.who is the creator of this notorious, albeit highly resilient, virus: Jointly built American-Israeli cyber weapon. Anonymous US officials speaking to the Washington post claimed the worm was developed during the administration of Barack Obama to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program with what would seem like a long series of unfortunate accidents.Details from nytimes: WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyber weapons, according to participants in the program.Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.Source: Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran Wiki source: Stuxnet

What is my computer busy doing when it temporarily freezes, even to the extent of the Task Manager window freezing when only half the CPU and two-thirds of the memory seems to be getting used?

Conduit is a hellstorm of horse hockey, to put it nicely. I have had more than my fair share of vulgarities to throw at it.Get rid of it. I recommend two anti-malware programs running in tandem. Use Malwarebytes and Microsoft Security Essentials together and one will find it. It has special coding that hides it from these programs or even more aggressively, freezes and locks them up when they discover it so that it cannot continue to scan and delete it. It also likes to hide its process. Make sure you "Show Processes from All Users."That being said, I almost guarantee that Conduit is hanging your system like you describe. It's happened to me too. It took me hours to solve this issue.There are guides online that also help defeating Conduit. It is by far my most hated malware and I wish I could be alone in a room with the guys who wrote it, preferably with a blunt object.