Yet Another Journal

Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans,
cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of.


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» Friday, September 19, 2003
The Big Sneeze

Well, I'm hacked. My computer somehow has gotten a virus.

This is a new virus, just identified late yesterday, which probably explains why when I ran Norton yesterday it said I had all the correct virus definitions and did not identify a virus in my computer. I seem to have gotten it instantly. It's very puzzling.

For one thing, I do not open attachments unless I know who they are and then I still look at the file name carefully before I open it. I've seen "photo" documents identified as image.jpg.scr or image.jpg.bat, which of course means it's actually an executable. I haven't opened any Word .doc files that could have a virus embedded in the macro. I haven't followed any links in e-mails to possibly infected web pages. Heck, if I don't know where the e-mail is from, it just gets tosses in the trash folder. It's probably just an ad for Viagra anyway.

I also haven't downloaded any executables lately, and I only download those from official sites.

The other thing is the distribution this thing is doing. We use Eudora, not Microsoft Virus Vector...I mean Outlook. But it is totally possible that whomever wrote the virus included some type of option that makes it work in Eudora. But as I understand these viruses, what they do is shoot off e-mails to people in your address book. I have looked at the bounce messages and I know none of these people. I have no idea how I could be "automatically sending" e-mails to people who aren't in my address book.

In any case, now I've got to download new virus definitions when I get home, clean the stupid hard drive off, and go into the registry. (I'll get James to do the last; he's the one with the A+ Cert .)

What a mess.