Nik,

You are right, this is not an anti-virus website and I'm not the local anti-virus expert either.

It looks similar to a virus which once invaded my office computer (and we have a corporate IT-team who take care of updates to the antivirus programs and run the anti-virus firewalls and e-mail scanners), just because I was out-of-the-office one afternoon when they installed corporate-wide an emergency new definition file for the anti-virus software and an update for the OS). I missed both, so next morning when I switched on my computer it was infected before I could brew my first cup of tea!

Nothing could be done to "clean" it or update Windows fast enough to avoid the virus from taking over and trying to spread. Only solution was to "reflash" the computer (i.e. re-install a clean copy of the OS and then put the back-up of my personal files on the new system). I didn't loose any files (thanks to the automatic back-up which runs everyday) but had to spend the next week re-installing all kind of "useful" tools and programs (all very much against the corporate standards of course) I need to do my job.

So if you can do it and have a recent back-up of your personal files: wipe the hard-disks and re-install from scratch and do an immediate update of your system before you even open IE or your e-mail program and close all ports you don't need except the ones for the update of your OS (I would thighten down the firewall even before I would plug in the network cable).

As for your other questions, I can't help you. I don't run any anti-virus software continuously on my home systems (it really gets in the way of all kind of other programs), just do every few weeks a scan of the computer, update the OS as much/as soon as needed and be generally very cautious with opening e-mail attachments and downloaded files (when in doubt don't open them or run them through an updated virus-scanner). And of course I have firewalls all around.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

In reply to Re: Virus Relative Question. by CountZero
in thread (OT) Virus Relative Question. by Nik

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