by Lexica-chan » Sat Dec 06, 2008 7:36 pm
Well, it's definitely a plus that your virus scanner (AVG, right?) is at least picking up SOMEthing. Now whether it really is a virus, or if it's just something that throws the scanner for a loop, that I don't know. :/
I've had my own experiences with viruses and whatnot of late, and it's still continuing to some extent. Here's the full story:
A few weeks ago, when I was playing with various firewall settings, I went off to my class. Nothing massively special.... until I came back, and I saw that I had more tabs open in Firefox than when I left. RED FLAG.
So, being paranoid as I am, was wondering what was going on... So, first thought, since the new tabs open were ads, I did a scan for adware, using Spybot Search & Destroy. Fine, and yes, it did pick up that there was something (specifically, the Virtumonde trojan). Anyways, as it turns out, the thing was a MASSIVE pain to eradicate.... at least one file attached itself to a critical Windows file (winlogon), and once you logged on to the computer, you couldn't eradicate it, because it would say that the bad file in question was in use.
Anyways, so after many hours of fiddling, and upgrading my virus scanner to the latest DAT files, I was able to get rid of the thing, and my compy had a clean bill of health. WHOO!
But then... the virus scanner was acting badly. It couldn't complete a scan on its own without a message popping up about how there was an unhandled exception, do I want to debug. *-_-* So, from that, comes my current quest, of getting a new virus scanner.
Since my old one was VirusScan 7 from McAfee, and it ~did~ actually help me kill off this last virus attack, I figured that would be a good place to begin. Yeah.... no. The latest version is NOT so hot, it loads up waaaaay too much stuff (most of which I disabled, since I use Zonealarm for my firewall needs), and without registration, it perpetually nags every few hours to register. With that kind of treatment, I'm already questioning it.
And, the kicker (and to bring it full circle to what you're demonstrating in your picture). So, I've been looking of late for Portable Software, which I can stick onto my flash drive and take wherever. Interesting stuff, really. Anyways, one program I wanted to have was portaPuTTY... it's a terminal application I can use to talk to the CS department computers. Anyways, so I downloaded the file, and tried to decompress it. And every time, I would get most of the files, except the main executable... which was bizarre. I tried this several times, with various programs (WinRAR, the compressed file handler in XP, and even Universal Extractor), and each time, there was an error, yet the ZIP file itself had no corruption.
What was the issue? McAfee was quarantining the main executable, AND without showing an error message. *>_<* Just does it all behind the scenes, and if I didn't know better, I'd have thought that something malevolent was happening again. (Well, it is, but it's from my "would-be savior." *-_-* )
So thus I continue my quest for a virus scanner.... suggestions, anyone? I currently am considering two.... Zonealarm (because I'm already using their firewall, so it's not that much of a leap), and Sophos (the university has a site license). I'm not too keen on the second option, though.... I don't trust the university, ever since I had to take my computer down to their lab (twice!!) to get it checked out when the people there were incompetent, and a few years ago, the university put forth a policy of requiring all Windows machines have installed a piece of crapware which scanned your computer for "undesirable" aspects... not the latest Windows updates, virus scanner updates, or even potentially file-sharing programs.... *-_-* <Sigh> I had that entire system beat within two weeks, and kept my XP SP1 systems intact. *^_^*
"In the beginning there was darkness and void. And then
The Encoder said 'BlankClip(color=$FFFFFF)' and there was
light. The Encoder looked upon the light and saw that it
was good, for it was RGB32."
(although there has been some debate over the Encoder's
choice of container, since Life doesn't support any form
of rewinding.)
--The Darkhold Accord
