'Allo, Jace

[Terygon]

How you doing?

[JaceSan]

Hi Tery, I'm okay. I have to go down to school and review for a final that I'm taking tomorrow, but I've been messing around with my home PC.

It seems the virus cleaning that I did the other day with a virus scan didn't get rid of one of the bugs. It caught one, but I had to go in and remove the other manually. Pain in the ass considering I don't know much about computer systems. I'm learning the hard way I guess.

How've you been?

[Terygon]

Not bad, considering 'tis the season for finals. Just found out I have three on one day, since due to memorial day we have to move the ones that should be on Monday. Not too stressed, though, cause I figure if I don't know it yet, I probably shouldn't pass the course anyway.

Virii suck. Hope you got them all.

Final in what class?

[JaceSan]

Tomorrows test's in Design of Experiments. A statistics class from the Industrial Systems Engineering dept.

Next Monday I have one in Solid State Kinetics from the Materials Engineering dept.

Three on the same day?!? Yikes. Even if you're thoroughly prepared three tests in one day will be exhausting. Good luck.

[Exotic Ginger]

JaceSan, how did you find the second virus, if your virus scanner didn't pick it up?

[JaceSan]

Hi Gem. Like I mentioned on the other thread, I was being paranoid and started going through the log the firewall keeps of all net activity. I found a program that was sending out packets without me initiating them.

I thought there might be more than one program initially, which is why I ran more scans after finding the first one. Some viruses (virii) will duplicate themselves. Virus scans don't pick up legally manufactured software used for spying either. That's something I just learned.

The firewall program identifies which programs are sending info. and where they're located. I pulled the program out and found the creation date was last Sunday. The day I downloaded the "screensaver". I'm really at a loss to explain why the scan didn't pick it up. I even ran a direct scan on the program itself and it didn't set off any alarms.

[Exotic Ginger]

That's actually pretty scary. I think I'm going to go home and thoroughly check my computer now. [img]eek.gif[/img]

[JaceSan]

If you think that's scary, wait 'til you get a load of this. I'm running Kazaa last night downloading stuff and not paying any attention to what people are uploading from me. I get an instant message from another user,

"Do these things actually work?"

"What things?" I type back.

"These pop-up killers I'm downloading from you?"

WTF?!?! I look down and sure enough he/she's downloading programs with the title pop up stopper 3.5 and pop up defender 6.5

I immediately type back,"Dude I do NOT have any pop up killing programs. My PC has a virus and it probably changed it's name. Careful with those programs."

I go back to Kazaa'a search engine and look for pop up killng programs and find hundreds. Download a few and scan them, not only with my copy of the virus scanner, but emailing them to a separate account at yahoo which scans all attachments with the latest virus detecting software. Some of the files I look at are different viruses. A couple are okay.

I originally downloaded what I thought was a screensaver. It may have replicated and disguised itself as a different type of program. O_o