Virus Alert

[JC Denton]

Recently, alot of viruses have been floating around the email world. Most notably the "free screensavers" email. Just a friendly reminder to scan your stuff, even if you're lazy. If you don't have an anti-virus, I heartily recommend AVG (http://www.grisoft.com) as they have a good email scanner and it's free. You can also get your system scanned for free by Trend Micro's online House Call (http://housecall.trendmicro.com/) service. I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard it's a good fix.

Biggest rule you can probably follow is don't open attachments you've never heard of (or the sender for that matter). That's how 99% of all viruses are brought online, careless attachment opening. Poke around with OE and make sure it doesn't "auto-open" attachments either. If you do get smacked with one of those buggers, clean it out ASAP because the latest screensaver one spams anyone on your MSN list and address book.

If you're getting these from a friend, be a pal and let them know about it, so they don't infect anyone else <_<.

[ToxicFool]

There is a new virus out its the "lirva" virus i think.. named after Avril La--idunno-vene :wacko:

[JC Denton]

Well so far, I've seen "YaHa," "KOF," and "Lirva." The Trend Housecall scanner I linked can find all of these if you have them. So if you suspect a virus, pay them a visit ASAP.

[ToxicFool]

I have Norton antivirus and i ran a scan i am virus free :D

[mOOkie]

I was sure this thread was a trap... some virus just waiting to infest my HDD.

[SnipeBoy]

Ive got a virus, well the doctor said it was more like just a cold. >_< doh wrong type.
Ive only ever had 2 computer viruses and they were from college machines.

[CrazyHorse]

TrendMicro also has two e-mail newsletters you can subscribe to. The "Alert" one comes out when a new big virus has been found and then the other one is sent out about every other week I think, and it lists the viruses that have had the biggest impact on users for that week and other things.

They're quite informative, and keep you up to date on what nasty viruses are out there.

[d0nk`]

2 viruses? im lucky if i only get 4 per 3 months! ive had this comp for almost 2 months and already had 4 different viruses (non-email)

[Haysoos]

I've never had any big viruses, had some stupid word95 viruses that didnt do anything apparently... but i remember workin at a small web design place when a few of our comps got hit with a big virus that preyed on MS. i forgot the name, was about a year and a half ago, but it was hitting EVERYONE at the time. Took us about 5 trys to get it off our machine, wasnt a big deal cause it was just a workstation comp, but we ran virus scan, used the norton fix that supposedly clean the registry, then cleaned the registry manually and cleaned the startup, autoexec, etc etc... fortunatly our server was linux, so it never got touched. The web design company my brother works for used all MS servers and several of their servers were infected and went down for a few days. The only email i use is hotmail, which scans automatically, and i never open mail from people I dont know, and im still cautious when i get attachments from people i know. It amazes me how people get viruses so easily. Also, whenever you get a virus, dont just run a scanner, goto www.symantec.com and look it up. A lot of viruses need to be cleaned from your startup and registry and other creative little things that virus scanners might now do.

[d0nk`]

$h!t

i came down to teh comp today. norton auto-scan (runs every night at 2:45) found 4 viruses! i havnt downloaded anything so i dont know. all were trojan horses, and located in "C:\WINNT\system32\font\explorer.exe (or win32.exe, findfiles.exe and wintech.exe)