new virus flood

Is it only me or did other people experience the same too? Today I had 175 copies of this new Virus with a 75kB Zip Attachment. what's that anyway? (Guess it's "Sober!M681" tho actually I didn't touch it)
From other viruses, like the 25kB attachment that was around for a while now, I only get about 3 or 4 each day. Seems like a lot of people with my adress in their adressbook where infected by this new one. People who usually are careful.

I just read at McAfee...

body:
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---
I mean, how stupid can ppl be?

This one is also mean:

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

*** Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-
*** 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Room 3220
*** Washington, DC 20535
*** phone: (202) 324-3000
----------

Or this german one:

Glueckwunsch: Bei unserer EMail Auslosung hatten Sie und weitere neun
Kandidaten Glueck.
Sie sitzen demnaechst bei Guenther Jauch im Studio! Weitere Details ihrer
Daten entnehmen Sie bitte dem Anhang.

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+++ Geschaeftsfuehrung: Dr. Constantin Lange
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+++ 50829 Koeln
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-------

Promises you're invited at a TV Show...

Well it seems preventing "social engineering" is the last weak link.

do you actually open mail from people you don't know...

--Mike

No, of course not and I never get infected by a mail attachment, but I hate to delete my spam folder because sometimes there are NON-spam mails, so I got to visually check all mail subjects before I empty the spam folder.

You know you can get a virus even from people you know, especially since these trojans/viruses/worms use the ms adressbook of an infected machine, so when you used to store my adress, I may get an infected mail from you. Or some worms also use a fake sender ID, also taken from the adress book. So if we both are stored in Pukis adressbook and he accidently clicks one of those nasty thingies, I may get a mail from "you". In fact this is the common case.

I did receive same emails many times in past few days, but I didnt touch it at all..just delete...

That's right. I've been running my machine for 3 years
with no antivirus and no problems. If you have a
firewall (software and hardware in my case), you'll
be safe as can be.

Those people who get those nasty viruses either asked
to be infected by openning attachments, or were
specifically hacked by someone. Agree?

My regular email addresses don't seem to get any spam (or viruses). However, after posting one of my games on a freeware video games site along with another of my email addresses I don't even bother checking that email address anymore it is just full of what I assume are virus/spam emails.

drew: For the non tech-savvy reading your post, they might think "firewall = no viruses".

The general population don't know what a firewall is, don't know what one does but will quite happily sit on a bus talking with their friends saying "yes, my Johnny put a firewall on my internet so I don't get viruses".

I have overheard this conversation between two middle-aged women, almost word-for-word.

That's a somewhat naive assumption. For starters, a firewall isn't going to protect you against unchecked buffer overflow exploits or embedded macros in badly engineered applications.

Anyway, how do you know you aren't infected if you don't have any anti-virus software?

Blimey. Do some people actually believe using Firewalls (hard or soft) gives them virus protection? :/

Interesting way to put it you know... My friend had played a joke on me a while ago... I used to... Well, nevermind what I use to do, but he calls me up and he was like "This is seargant Petrov (I'm from Russia) sepaking, we have a complaint that..." blah-blah-blah...
I almost freaking crapped my pants!

Seems so... So naive...

Hack military networks? :P

I used to get free calls by connecting to a PBX system on a freephone number. I knocked that on the head the day I got a call from 'BT security'.

These days I keep on the straight and narrow. Well, as straight and narrow as one can be with access to usenet and emule and 2Mb of bandwidth.

Really obvious virus' annoy the hell out of me...

[puts on a flat cap and slippers]I remember when a virus was no bigger than 5k, infected your computer without you knowing about it, didn't have to be run per-se and wasn't as obvious as a 42K attachment, saying 'please run me, I'm a virus'... it's rubbish...[/flatcap and slippers]

The last decent virus I got was when you first started getting flashable bios' ... Think I had a celeron 300a, and I got a virus (probably through the visiting of so many porn sites I'm suprised I've any vision left) and it infected my computer... and did nothing... not a thing... didn't even know I was infected... switched the computer off...

... when I tried to switch the computer on... it didn't... no bios... computer totally dead...

After doing a bit of research I found out it was probably a bios virus... and how to fix it; Luckily a friend of mine had a very similar motherboard (same brand and bios). I Borrowed his bios chip, booted up the computer, virus scanned and killed the bugger... downloaded the latest bios flash then (Don't try this at home kids) whilst the computer was switched on, removed the bios chip and replaced it with my corrupt one, flashed it, rebooted and returned my friends chip.

Yep... When I finally matured I started supporting the developer...
This is the reason why I don't use Photoshop, 3ds MAX and other expensive software anymore. ;-)
I've bought many of the games that I've pirated as a kid and now I'm happy.
But my friend really freaked me out... His voice seemed so unfamiliar and he said "we've traced your ip through..." and all I was thinking "OMG! How do I get out of this!" ;-)
But in the end he couldn't maintain this attitude and as he was just about to say where I should go with all necessary documents tomorrow he bursted out laughing... That was a relief!!!

I remember an old virus that would copy the BIOS to RAM and then wipe the BIOS. Then you had to play an ASCII text fruit machine to try and win your BIOS back. If you lost - screwed. If you switched the computer off - screwed. There's some sick bar stewards about. :P

years ago my P133 got the Tremor virus. Basically everytime the hard drive was accessed in DOS the screen jiggled around, I thought it was some kinda hardware fault at first, well weird. Amiga had tons of viruses some really dumb ones, like mouse cursor tuning into a male member or cool ones like the screen melting.

I remember the one where random characters (in word processor, etc.) would just drop off the bottom of the screen.

I remmember one that played music on your pc's floppy drive! Awesome!

big10p yeah I remember that. I actually ended up collecting a load on a single disk for um fun.

There were some interesting virusses on the Amiga and Atari.

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged -- Every 5 minutes it pops up a dialog box to insult you in a different way.

Or randomy switch some of your mouse axis around every couple of minutes, so now moving your mouse left makes the arrow go down, down becomes up, buttons switch around. Especially annoying when it keeps changing which direction goes where.

Or some that would intercept any disk-write operations and instead of the information you really try to save, substitute it with its own random text.

There was a russian virus that would add curses in sentences of your document files. ;-)
That was fun!

The smallest virus was only 19 bytes long. Yeah, those zipped viruses in emails are real dumb. But they still work. It's social engineering that is doing the trick. Click here unless you want to be doomed! People believe it. They also believe a lot of other crap TV tells them, so no surprise.

BTW a firewall surely gives you some kind of control. Unlike hardware firewalls some software solutions will not only block unwanted protocols etc, but also tell you when an application is trying to "phone home" and THAT will tell you a lot. But of course, a good antivirus app is required. I'd suggest to use a resident Guard that prevents even the very first execution of known viruses.

Woah, wait a minute! Hehe, I guess I should have said
that over the past 3 years, I've had no serious
viruses. Just some data-miners and the like. A firewall is
a poor substitute for antivirus, I agree. But if you're
careful when surfing you'll get very few in the first place.
That's what I was trying to say.

Every now and then I visit one of those online virus and
spyware scanners. Especially before using my creditcard
online! They catch a bunch here and there.

I use 4 things, Windows firewall, Avast, Adaware, and regular visits to MS Update, this seems to keep things away.

My ISP blocks them at source, then I have the router firewall, Kerio Firewall and Norton AntiVirus with Internet Worm Protection. Nothing gets through to this baby.

oh yeah I forgot about ISPs doing basic virus protection.

Of course most ISP's do email virus protection. They will not protect you from a virus being downloaded over other channels, such as the www, usenet, IM, IRC, and others.

And then there are the worms that use windows vulnerabilities to spread. You can keep those out to an extend by blocking a whole bunch of different ports, but doing so also prevent legitimate connections from getting established.

e.g. blocking port 1433 and 1434 to keep the SQL slammer worm out also means you can't connect to said SQL server remotely yourself.

blocking port 139 to prevent some of the netbios nastyness also means that you can't remotely map a harddrive yourself, etc.

Because of that (and many others), most ISP's will not block all of those ports by default, so you won't be protected against virusses that exploit them.

I use nod32+ad-aware+spyware blaster+windows xp firewall and as Grey Alien said windows update a must.

That wasn't a virus, that was a legitimate exe! But don't do it on the A1200 drives, they can't hack it.


Much the same here, except I've switched to MS Antispyware, the realtime protection is nice (and free) and it picks up more of CoolWebSearch than AdAware. Still not all of it, but more nonetheless.

if a virus checker is not running, you will only know if it has a payload and it goes off. But until you find out, the virus is now spreading from your machine to others.
A payload may not me disructive to the computer. It could be aimed at hurting the user. i.e Ident theft , stealing bank info, putting a hole in your firewall.
So a virus does not always inform you. And if it does it is to late!

Some further tipps

-when a hacker is asking you what antivirus software and firewall you are using, don't tell.

-install an update of your antivirus software from a magazine cd from time to time, with full deinstall and reinstall, to make sure the app is not tunneled (a good reason to use freeware: can be found on coverdisks frequently)

-try not to use windows XP because it forces you to give "Generic Host" web access, that is like a taxidriver and you don't know exacltly who's his customer. Use traffic meters and packet sniffers to get an idea of what's going on at your ports. Uncheck autostart of Messenger in the autostart settings. Make sure to have the latest service packs of XP.

-In windows 98 and ME rename vnbt.386 to something diffrent,so Netbios is not activated, therefor a portscan won't tell the hacker that it's a windows machine any longer.

-Browse the web with script off by default.

-don't use outlook, microsoft internet explorer, messenger.

-turn off referrer information in your browser settings

-delete web cache and history frequently.

-don't store passwords in textfiles on your machine.