Somehow, I managed to pick up a virus. I downloaded Clamwin (Clam antivirus for Windows -- an open source virus checker) and it went nuts telling me that just about every .exe, .scr (screen saver,) and maybe a few other types were infected. Not being one to goof around, I popped the Win 2K disk in, rebooted, and did a fresh install on my C: drive. It wasn't just any fresh load, though. I deleted the partition, reinstalled it, and formatted it with NTFS. Once I got things loaded, I used the infection report file to delete all the bad files from the secondary partition of my 40 meg... I mean gig drive [snicker.] The trouble is, I have a bunch of old drivers and software on that drive. The fortunate part is that a lot of it was there only because I never deleted it after I unzipped it and moved it. For a while, I thought I had lost some difficult to replace items, like Smart Ripper (removes encryption from DVD video files,) a DVD codec installer, and a few other things. After all was said and done, I managed to free up a three or four gig on that drive -- all without losing anything of any consequence.
I still don't know where that &*(% bug came from. I thought I had brought it from my old place of employment and accidentally infected a copy of Gunman. I deleted my copy and unzipped the archive.
Infected. (I could tell because the executable has its own checksum inside and warns that it had been altered.)
I was sure that I had zipped infected copies of Gunman and Half Life oh so many years ago. So, after cleaning everything up and doing one last scan to make sure that everything is clean, I unzipped a copy.
It was clean.
Now I get it. My coy of Winzip was infected, so it immediately infected all the programs as it unzipped them.
Extract and infect in one easy step. How convenient!
So anyhow, I'm up and running better than before -- except for the fact that I have a bunch of MP3s and several years worth of email on my toasted 120 gig drive. I also have my backup copy of Visual Foxpro 7.0 on that drive. I ought to have it on a CD somewhere, but I haven't seen it in a while.
Still, all in all, I came out remarkably unscathed for having had to deal with such an aggressive infection.
As an extra safety precaution, I zipped both my programs\ and drivers\ directory with a password so that there's no way a virus is going to get to the files inside (though it could trash the archive.)
The next thing I need to do is to make another attempt at using System Rescue to fix the 120 gig disk (Thanks Jo-Anne!) I managed to make the bootable CD and use it, but I didn't get the disk fixed.
Someone needs to come up with a suitable punishment for people who write malware and let it loose on the web. Maybe Amy can morf them into pig hybrids or something.
OK... rant over. Even nerds need to vent sometimes.
Ray Drouillard
Comments
Free Antivirus
Hi. I ran into some problems a while back with spyware and trojans. If you are looking for a good, free solution go to www.cnet.com Find a program called Spyware Terminator. It's free and it's very powerfull. the only downside to it is that it can take a while to run. This program worked for me when others would not. Believe me I tried a lot of them.
Jessica Marie
AVG - Grisoft has a really good free - antivirus application
see http://free.avg.com/ it is free for non-commercial home use, and is updated constantly.
I have used it for my older machines, and am currently using it in my XP Home virtual PC session that I have on my wifes laptop for running some software that does not work with Vista Ultimate, since I have fully used my 3 licenses of Norton, and did not want to pay for an additional license on that virtual pc session which is not used that often.
Consider something like WinRAR
or some other ZIP extractor... With two on the box, you might be able to avoid both being infected. Or keep your "useful" utilities like that on a drive not installed.
I probably should admit to not doing this stuff myself. But then, I have this useless firewall runing (BlackIce) whether I want it or not...
Good Luck Ray. Let us know how toasted drive tastes. (I've an old Maxtor 250 that refuses to talk to any of the computers in the house.)
Annette
Maxtor
It's a Maxtor drive that's toasted. I should have spent the extra ten bucks to get a Western Digital. The salesperson told me that Maxtor is as good as WD. Pthui! I have a pile of bad Maxtor drives, and I don't recall ever losing a WD.
By the way, I found all my drivers and a lot of my programs on an old 8 gig drive that I had mounted in a kid machine. The only thing I lost was a command line version of DeCSS (removes CSS encryption from DVDs so that they can be backed up,) but it was still nice to know that I had backups that I had forgotten about. heh.
I think I really need to get a firewall. Maybe I'll use an old Pentium machine to share internet, and do the filtering there. I wonder if I can get Freesco to run on it with a firewall.
Like I have time to goof around with all that stuff. :-/
Ray
Thanks!
Thanks for the info about AVG and Spy Assassin. I was running AVG before, and never had this problem; so I ought to grab a new copy and do it again. I was always concerned that the various commercial AV products would be useless against spyware. Adding spy assassin to the mix ought to get everything.
Just a half an hour or so ago, a new modem connection appeared on my list, and it appeared to be trying to connect itself. I looked in the properties and noticed that it was bound to MS print and file sharing.
Nasty Nasty Nasty!
I deleted it and looked in the file that contains the dial-up info (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk\rasphone.pbk) and made sure it was gone.
This stuff is nasty. I would hate to see what happens to someone who is relatively clueless about computing.
Ray
Were do you pick up this stuff?
I'm probably jinxing myself :), but I haven't had a virus in years!
I run, Zone alarm, AVG antivirus, and Spybot Search and Destroy. As well as the hardware firewall in my modem. Rarely, I get a warning from one of my security programs, maybe only once a year, but nothing ever gets through.
What are you doing differently that you are getting hammered with these nasty things?
Mr. Ram
Good question
It's been almost a decade for me, too -- and the last one was due to a bit of stupidity at work. I ran a file that I hadn't checked first. I spent the rest of that evening after work exorcising the dumb thing from my computer (& didn't tell the IS staff about it because I didn't want to hear any crap. I know: bad, bad, bad me. baaaaad programmer.)
The one before that was really sneaky. I double-clicked on what looked like a text file. It wasn't something.txt, though. It was something.txt .scr. That was when Win95's long filename ability was brand-new. Before that, one of our customers passed us a virus from their Brazilian branch. That thing was aggressive.
Right now, I'm using clamwin, which doesn't seem to have anything that scans email. I haven't been using email much lately, and I haven't gotten any strange attachments. In fact, that bit of spyware I picked up yesterday came through without the help of email. I didn't run email yesterday.
You can bet I'm going to be running the virus checker as soon as I disconnect. As soon as I get to the library, I'm going to download a bunch of stuff and install it.
The people writing viruses just for the challenge are bad enough, but the organizations that condone and use adware and spyware are the worst.