[Pixie Nim]

hey guys. Just thought I ought to warn you about this one... or at least, keep an eye out, eh?

Trojan virus that my boyf picked up recently, although I'm not too sure where (sorry). Yay. Fun. Yay. Happy. Norton didn't notice it. Happy, happy, happy.
From the log it's obvious they spent a bit of time poking about deleting stuff, set up their harder to find back door, and while my boyfriend was out at uni (and had accidentally left both comp. & modem on - not connected to net tho.) - they had obviously set it up to dial at a certain time. And did so.
Then, they deleted a load of stuff, downloaded onto his computer 2 Gig of nasty nasty graphic porn, changed the desktop to match, and left a lil .txt document on the desktop entitled "hi there"... mm, nice people. Then, connected to the net, every time it opened about 500+ download windows and 1000+ explorer windows, all of them accessing porn sites and downloading images of porn.
Oddly reminiscent of that '98 hacking film, The Net, where they left a little pi symbol in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, and pressing escape makes everything go badly tits up. Well, they did that too. Only the pi symbol was about 5 pixels by 5 pixels, and very difficult to spot.

Thankfully, nothing on the computer that couldn't be replaced - in the end he removed WinXP, wiped the C: drive, and replaced it.

Hmm, I guess I wanted to warn you, but I can't... we've got no idea where the Trojan came from, and have already let people who write virus checkers know, so... I mean, tracks were pretty well covered... it was more or less impossible to find. Debatable anyone would have noticed it was there, had they not got bored and decided to wreck the computer instead...
But will not happen again, with a bit of luck, an industrial strength inferno-wall, and a few extra precautions...

scary scary invasion of privacy stuff... anyway... just in case!

Pixie

[Awetopsy]

Im sorry if this sounds extreme... but I think people who make viruses should be hunted down and shot.

or at least they should be hunted down and thrown in prison for a while and banned from computers for the rest of their natural lives.

sorry to hear about that tho.. I hope he got everything really cleaned off of it.

[Brain]

Hear hear Awetopsy! When a virus crippled my computer one week before my scholarship application was due, I was ready to cry profusely and rip the person who made the virus apart with my bare teeth. Thankfully I backed everything up, but I was in mad crunch mode to get the computer working again and finalise my folio.

And also, what's with this w32.Klez.gen virus lately? I've easily received it 20+ times in the last week in my inbox. I even had a "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" come in the other day. Couldn't believe it's still going around.

Keep those virus definitions updated boys and girls. They're condoms for your PC. @:-)

[Nilwort]

I haven't had any problems with viruses at all and I don't use any virus scan software...Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe It's the fact that I rarely give my email out online or the fact that I don't use IMs that much...

It's also really good to get in the habit of backing stuff up to...almost the the point of being psychotic about it...I burn a cd of all my important projects, patches, and drivers almost every month. If I'm working on a paper (like brain said) I keep it on a floppy and out of the drive in case a virus decides to corrupt it...that way, when and if a virus hits I laugh and say: "ahahAHHAH! format c:" and then reinstall everything.

[Pixie Nim]

oddly enough, someone else on another board posted a thread about a Trojan yesterday... maybe it was the same one....

yeah, I agree about the virus thing. People who write them are just... malicious.
The only virus infection I would ever condone would be a personal act of revenge courtesy of me.... << of course, I would only take out one specific computer with the virus... maybe get it to run one command endlessly until it heats up too much and blows... or just ask it to shut down the fan or something.... permenant destruction... heheh... I definately would never write anything that spread...

Pixie