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Post your comments for Is It a Virus? here

[coastie65]

HI Lincoln, Nice article. I agree in that it seems that the big thing these days is the Trojan, and it seems to be getting a lot of people, myself included. In my case, I was doing some research and clicked on a legimate site that had been hijacked so anybody looking for the same stuff I was on Win XP and clicked on the site, would have received the same welcoming gifts I did, which included something that hijacked my wallpaper of all things. It was extremely time consuming to take care of that mess, as I had stuff everywhere, including my restore volumes.One rule of thumb that I develpoed after that is, if I click on a site and get something other than what I was expecting, I do nothing further and close out the window as it has most likely been hijacked. I have anti hijacking stuff in here, but it does no good if the site itself has been hijacked. coastie65

[LincolnSpector]

Hi, Coastie.
If you think that was difficult, I got it from the other end a few months ago. I came home from a vacation to discover that one of my sites, bayflicks.net, had been hijacked! I went through hell fixing that up!
btw, when I went to my site, Kaspersky Internet Security blocked the malware from attacking my PC.
Lincoln

[coastie65]

Hi Lincoln, At the moment, I have Avast! and Webroot Spysweepr running actively and SUPERantispyware as a redundancy scan to Webroot, as well as Malwarebytes. It didn't get real deep, although I did find one or two registry entries plus one in Processes in my Task manager. The big one was the downloader Zlob, which I had always associated with adult sites, which I guess has branched out to other sites as well :D . I guess it would be a rough ride to have a site Hijacked. Having a computer infected is a time consuming clean up that causes it's share of grumbling during the process. Although, I was reasonably sure I had gotten the Trojan out of my systen restore volumes, I deleted them and created a new restore point to be on the safe side. I also uninstalled Java as they can hide in there as well and then reinstalled that. I ran a substantial number of scans with different utilities during the clean up, which as I said was time consuming. Charlie (coastie)

[techdragn]

So I guess you have never asked for a "Kleenex" or have someone "Xerox" a copy for you?
"Virus" is becoming one of those generic terms that sticks because the average user understands that this is a BAD thing. Most users dont understand "Malware" or "Greyware" any more than they do "Vaporware". I would much rather have my users tell me they have a virus, then try to venture a guess as to what the problem really is. So what if it turns out to be "spyware"? The whole point is that they call when the trouble starts rather than ignore it, and then use a company credit card on the infected computer and compromise the account?
Just my 2 cents.

[coastie65]

Personally, I think that was a very good two cents worth. coastie65

[oregonnerd]

Actually, the usage of 'virus' was coined by John Brunner in Shockwave Rider, which was published in 1975.

--Glenn