Have you had a computer virus?

[swarfendor437 14]

A couple of years back now (I think) and a hard drive ago I had come back from a weekend in London (most enjoyable - in fact the wine served at Spaghetti House was too enjoyable!) It had been raining lightly making the roads a bit slippy - I and the family were dashing across the road toward the shopping complex near India Quays when I fell and split my head open - I think this can only account for me doing something I would NEVER logically do.

I was looking for blue prints/video of how to make a hutch for guinea pigs - found a reference to a rabbit hutch - there was a video available but I needed to install a new codec 'adult.lube' - this should have stopped me from clicking but my right forefinger had a mind of its own and within a second Virtumonde was all over the place! I was running Spybot S&D at the time which picked some of it up but not all and it would not clean correctly. Went on their forums only to follow advice that led to 2 more viruses which Panda Internet Security picked up - quarantined but would not delete - on hindsight think these were false positives. Any way, what I liked at the time was my Sabayon 3.4f was able to delete the nasties - as I was in Linux with no Windows services running there was nothing to stop me deleting the nasties from quarantine and off the machine. The biggest problem at present appears to be conficker virus; this has hit work machines - I have always been careful but conficker is a nasty brute (I wish I could get my hands on the personage who wrote it as it exploits network and printer shares!). I put a USB dongle in the machine - never used before, and conficker virus was picked up by Sophos - the problem then arises is that any file on the stick cannot be accessed because it is blocked from use. If any of you out there have been hit by this USB dongle nasty (your hard drive can get infected as well) is that you may need to use 'unlocker' from here - you need to have 'show hidden files' and unhide 'system files' to see the two files that you did not have on your USB memory stick before conficker struck - autorun.inf and Recycler/s. Delete these two files and you should now be o.k.

 

best regards,

swarfendor43

[waddler8 10]

Panda USB Vaccine

[swarfendor437 14]

Panda USB Vaccine

 

At the time Vaccine was not available - I was running Panda Internet Security 2008 I think - currently running Comodo Internet Security as the budget was too tight to renew this year.

 

best regards,

swarfendor43