Well, Brothers and Sisters:

There is indeed someone ON PAR with a motherfucker of a scammer.

He (doubtfully a female) is the writer and sender of virurs. Nasty ones; not playful ones at all.

I'm hardly computer illerate, but while not a programmer, understand:

1. It is important to have a current anti-virus program, updated regularly, enabled. I have.

2. Back up your files. I do.

I run Windows NT, MS Office 2000, and Norton Anti-Virus (constantly updated via LiveUpdate and auto-enabled).

After noticing some strange things on 1 January (not silly screens or whatnot), such as being disconnected exaactly, EXACTLY every 3.5 minutes from BOTH my ISPs All Windows settings appear normal, by the way. No phone line problems.

PLUS, the BSOD saying "out of physical" memory, crashing my PC, even though at the the time I was using about 20 MB of the 64 MB of RAM I have.

And going through a rather systematic routine of diagnosics and consulting with a few local computer bros, I concluded:

SOMEONE SENT ME A NEW YEAR'S PRESENT, A VIRUS, AND ONE NOT NOTICIBLE BY MY NORTON. VIRUS WRITING IN BULGARIA, ROMANIA, POLAND, RUSSIA, IS FAMOUS.

But to me, heretofore, good old Norton AV has worked fine. And I get attached files all the time, which I open -- knowing I'm protected.

Since it's a national holiday, I can't even go to the local CD markets and pick up an anti-virus program meant specifically for this part of the world.

So, I'm gonna do this:

Try to find and save all the important file MS strews all over hell.

Reformat my main drive and reinstall all my important programs.

What a joy. I want to go back to bed. In the meantime, I'm effectively out of communication.

Happy Fucking New Year to the Motherfucker who did this.

Any suggestions?

Dexter
a.k.a. still Titus Antonicus

WHoever did this it must suck. Shops open up tomm.

------------------

Shops open tomorrow, too. Everybody drunk until 10 January. Typical. Cold as hell, too.

Gotta go. 1 minute left.

Dex

Good luck on the computer bull shit.

1 minute burst. Next will be for WCP, then it is quits for the day.

Dexter
a.k.a. Titus Antonicus

Depending on which WIN32 filesystem you are running you have a couple options:

If you're running something like fat16-32. Get Windows ME (49.00 USD for upgrade) and use the NTFS filesystem. Or if you have money to burn, pick up NT or Win2K Pro, install either of them onto NTFS.

The hope here is that the virus cannot use both FS types.

Grab Partition Magic from Powerquest, at the moment they have a version of it that ships with Red Hat. Install WINE on the Red Hat partition, grab your important win32 files from the windows partition and put them on your linux partition. Using WINE you should be able to still use those files.

Or even better, back-up your files. Install Solaris X86. Unpack the windows files onto your newly created UFS.

Cleqrly time for reformat and reinstall. With SOL this time.

And (hopefullly), in the nere future, with q new computer,Win 2000/Office 2000 and the the works.

Geez, I'm glad I'm a lightning typ8st.

Thanks again, because this really, really sucks.

Dexter
a.k.a. Titus Andonicus

Did you receive any "strange" (from someone you didnt expect anything from) emails with attachments recently? Did you open it? If so, then yes it was probably a trojan, not a virus. The difference is that a virus will infect your system and try to spread itself and not do any damage. Why? Because if it doesn't do any damage, then it goes unnoticed and can spread longer. A trojan on the other hand, is harmful and will do some sort of immediate damage when opened. Trojan's are VERY VERY difficult to detect, especially under Windows since Win32 is such a POS non-secure, OS.

Chances are that if you didnt get any strange attachments , that it is not a virus/trojan at all. Usually it's just Windows that f'd you over and corrupted some vital files on your hard drive. Grab yourself a harddisk scanning program (one comes with Windows called Scandisk - look in Programs/Accessories/System Files) and run it. If you find some crosslinked files or bad sectors, let the program try to fix 'em.

Regardless, back up ALL your important stuff frequently and then reinstall Windows anyway. I reinstall it every 4-6 months, cause it just gets unstable with time.

my $0.02

i open stuff all the time; onlly i assu,med o was protectecd./

Happy new year and thanks, dex

As a general rule to everyone, NEVER EVER open any attachments in emails. It doesn't even matter if it's coming from a friend or not. Some virii, when opened, will open your address book and email themselves to your entire contact list! Remember that "Love Virus" scare a while back? That's what it did, and that's why it infected so many people. It didnt do anything harmful, it just emailed itself around with the subject line of "I love you" and pretending to have been sent by YOU. Nifty huh?

Only open zip files, text files, and images (jpg, gif, png, etc). Do not open HTML, VB Script files, EXE files, COM files. MOst of the time, this is the reason anyone catches a virus/trojan. That's the best advice I can give anyone.