It looks like once a year, no matter how carefull with surfing or emails I catch a virus, this time on my laptop. Always having the latest Norton Versioin updates and doing daily scans, again it must have hit me somepoint yesterday. I just cannot get why it happened, no attachments opened which I did not know are from a safe source, no foreign websites visited and the likes. Any idea what else I need to be aware of? Thanks a lot.
Brigitte (typing on the other PC while the laptop is in safe mode scanning for the buggers)
I do even have a firewall attached to the router. It is so annoying, I am on it for the last 2,5 hours now, having to backup the registry first time ever, going into safe mode and things I normally do not even dream of in my worst computer nightmares. I am a pretty good user but I am scared s…l..s when having to go into safemode and OS-things… Have a day of today to catch up with work here and now half of it is already waisted on getting the laptop back up running clean.
…and in safe mode it all takes so long, the scan is going for an hour now and still no finishing of it in sight. I just hope that the problem is solved after this scan and I do not have to go in the hosts file which Norton says can be affected, too.
But when you download emails, how can you prevent downloading infected files? My daily mail download can be up to 100 emails, many of them spams or infected, this is quite a risk without any scanning programm in the background?
Brigitte (still waiting for the scan to finish…)
Brigitte—I think you must have all emails scanned. My impression was that they were one of the most common sources of viruses. I have the Norton stuff and it is set to scan incoming and outgoing email. I don’t think it takes very long----things seem to open instantly, so unless you get awfully long emails I doubt you’ll notice a thing. I would change that setting right now!!! And remember to update your Norton stuff.
Edited to say that I realize now you are probably asking how you would scan emails from the on-line scanning sites, you are not saying that you don’t normally scan emails. Sorry! My misunderstanding.
I use that adware and Spybot and they work well. I haven’t had Norton say anything else was a virus though.
Brigitte: the recent versions of Norton Anti-Virus identify spyware as being “viruses,” even though they’re not. So it could be that Norton is telling you it found a virus during its system scan, but if you look closely you might see that in fact it’s just spyware. Furthermore, Norton can’t always succesfully delete spyware, so it may stay on your system and get caught again by Norton next time it does a system scan. Better to get a dedicated spyware-zapping program, like Spybot Search and Destroy.
I’ve been using Norton for years now and it’s been totally reliable; I receive dozens of viruses daily by e-mail but my machine has never been infected.
Well I don’t want to jinx myself but I’m real picky. I sometimes don’t even open mail from relatives or friends if I think the’ve forwarded some nonsense to me. I use the “delete” button a lot. And, as has been mentioned, Adaware is “Da bomb.”
I downloaded a free virus product and tested it by scanning with the just updated Norton and then with the free version of another product. The Free version found a virus that Norton missed.
I now use two free virus scanning products and three free spyware products. I haven’t had any further problems.
I use: AVG Free Edition, Avast, Spybot, Adaware, and microsoft antispyware.
I’m the same way..I don’t open certain file attachements, even from “trusted” sources. Word documents, excel files, and other Office documents can have virus macros attached.
Plus, I don’t really trust any “trusted” sources. Everyone can do something dumb…such as open a virus-laden excel file, think it’s cool, not know you got infected, and send it on. A have a friend who regularly sends me word documents and excel files that purport to have photographs or jokes imbedded in them. I always think to myself “Why were they stuck in a virusable media, rather than just sending as a plain picture file?”..since I usually can’t think of a good reason, the file goes in the trash.
Call me cynical, but it works for me. The only time I’ve ever got a virus was when I reinstalled Windows on a new box, and connected to the internet to get the critical updates. I happened to get caught by a worm in the 15 minutes between connecting and when I was patched, and it was easy enough to clean out. And since switchin to Firefox and only allowing cookies from a small handful of sites, I don’t get any spyware either.
in the last 2 months, Ad-Aware has found absolutely nothing to complain about. Microsoft can try to say that IE isn’t really as vulnerable as people say, and that Firefox isn’t as secure, but the proof is in the pudding.
I have sorted it out. Took me nearly 3 hours in total, what a waste of time and a handful of adrenalin going through my venes when I have to follow those restoration instructions step by step…
Unfortunately I have already forgotten what it was called otherwise I could check it up on Symantec again. I thought I understood it was a trojan and definitely had placed itself in the registry, grrrrrrr.
I have been very careful with attachments for the last 6 years since my very first computer crashed after a virus infection and was unrepairable after that. It seems to me that even though when the virus protection and firewall are set to high security level there must be a hole somewhere so these viruses can get through.
Thanks again for all the advice, will have to be even more careful and still I have no idea how I caught this one in the first place.
On this thread amar listed some security free ware he uses: http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=27626&highlight=spyware
I use some of them every couple of weeks or so. Not sure they would solve your problem, but they sure get rid of the pop-up ads and the like. Some take awhile to run, but you could do it during your lunch hour or something like that.
o.k. I found it on symantec, it is called backdoor.nibu.j discovered March 24, 2005. It is a trojan.
I imagine I should have been safe against it as it is “that” old already with lots of liveupdates meanwhile. I will investigate into the adaware, adware and the others as addons to my current Norton and as this is running out in a months time, see if I replace it with another product mentioned here. Thanks again for all these tips.
While I am at it on my Laptop, I checked Dell what they advise and they seem to work with McAfee. I really do not mind paying for a software to protect our computers as the value of reliability on them is so high for me. As I need to either update Norton next month for this one again or go for a new one, McAfee seems to be suggested alot more than Norton?
If you’re already paying for Norton, use something free like AVG as a backup.
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And stop using internet explorer & MS OUtlook entirely, except for windows updates.
Use Firefox or Opera. FF gets the hooplah, but Opera is in fact the better browser: it’s faster and once you’re used to tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, you’ll never want to be stuck using IE again.
Yes, firefox copied both those features from Opera, and the firefox implementation of tabbed browsing works OK, but the mouse gestures plugin does not work correctly.
Similarly, use thunderbird instead of Outlook. Making these changes will cut down on two major virus-vectors.
i suppose all viruses are killed by now 
