Digital Art Zone

People who write viruses deserve their own special place in hell.

I had to download a program to open rar files. A simple thing. I even downloaded the same program I used to have on my old computer (this comp is only a month old)....but apparently someone decided to put the virus into this legit program and place it back on the net.
So I have been offline for the last two days and now I have to reinstall everything all over again.

Such a PITA…..all because some idjit thinks its fun to write something that will damage computers.

Rawn

RawArt - 18 September 2012 04:36 PM

Such a PITA…..all because some idjit thinks its fun to write something that will damage computers.

Fun ... or profitable.

Virus-writing is no longer recreation, it’s business, and it’s a business that involves organized criminals and a whole bunch of other unpleasant folks. The goal is to get your computer working for them rather than you, and there’s big money involved.

I like to think that there’s a special circle of Hell reserved for these people.

I usually download free programs from download.com. They get checked, so I hope those are safe. Many times if a program is free I find it there…

I feel your pain. Had to do the same thing last week on account of a bit of spyware that came wrapped around a legit video player I downloaded from an equally legit, apparently trustworthy source. Even though my anti-malware programs detected and removed it, the damage was already done. Worse, it cost me a really big repair bill as I didn’t know what was wrong with the computer—it acted as though there were hardware problems when there weren’t and unfortunately only the hardware and tech support for that was covered by my warranty. Software support, two external hard drives ‘cuz I had to back everything up *fast* before everything died on me and finally a fix from Dell cost me the price of a new machine. Right now I am still putting everything back together on my system and praying to whatever Vengeance Deities there may be to blast whichever giant humanoid turd is responsible for “Incredibar”. Tar and feathers just won’t cut it, a good old fashioned smiting of Biblical proportions is what these virus makers and “script kiddie” criminals deserve.

It’s a good idea, but sometimes you can only get nice independent programs - like IrfanView, JDirStat, or other simple-interface programs that provide wonderful utilities - from the web sites of their creators, which may be more vulnerable to hacks (or just not watched that closely).  Firefox claims it’s scanning for viruses when I download items, but I suspect it may not be that accurate about that.

I’m sorry this happened to you, Raw.

Sorry to hear that. Which program was it, and where did you download it, by the way? I find drive-by Malware downloads are a serious problem these days, which is why I usually browse with scripts and plugins blocked.

If you need a program which can read rars. Peazip and 7-Zip both can do it. I use 7-zip but PeaZip is also good and perhaps has a better interface.
Peazip: http://peazip.sourceforge.net/
7-Zip : http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/

Thanx Guys

The guy in the shop loaded winrar on for me and told me to never download that other program again LOL
They were actually good to me, most of th work was still under warranty. They just charged me for a reinstall of my OS (which was about 1/3 of what they really should have charged, because they did a full cleaning on my machine)

Hate that I am going to miss almost a week of work though because of this (maybe only half a week…if I get all my installing doen tomorrow…but i wont hold my breath)

Rawn

My first question…are you 100% sure it was infected?

There is minor problem with most AV software these days…it tends to err on the side of ‘everything is infected’, so there is time spent disinfecting a clean system and time spent worrying if you got everything cleaned up.  Often various system tools/utilities (especially those that deal with network monitoring and ‘in depth’ security tools) are flagged like this. 

The downside is, if ‘everything’ is a threat then, people tend to become desensitized so when something really happens, they are caught by surprise.

It’s always best to get at least one ‘second’ opinion on a suspect file…if not more than one.  No single AV package is 100% against everything out there.  (On the other hand, running multiple AV apps at the same time is a recipe for disaster.)

A good place to check out a suspect file against multiple AVs is…

http://virusscan.jotti.org/en

You simply upload it and let them scan it.

SY…FF’s scan is as accurate as your resident AV program.  That’s what it uses, by default (and MS Security Essentials, if that’s all you’ve got on your system).

Good to know you got it all cleared up

Oh, mine was definitely infected. The last bits of it were hiding in Internet Explorer’s registry settings. Even though I don’t use that browser it comes with Windows and apparently you can’t uninstall the damn thing. Needless to say the first thing I did after getting Win7 up and running again was to disable IE just as soon as I got Chrome and FireFox.

*sniffle…pout*

With the title of the thread… I thought RawArt had made a new beasty for us from ancient Greece….

*double pout*

Good for you to find them on internet explorer registry because mine was infected 7 times last week and i had to delete the whole system 7 times,gess where did i found them?in my zbrush 3 folder and don’t even know how the hack they camp there!
but now i am pretty sure that nothing will hit me again,you fold me once,shame on you.you fold me 7ence,i will kill you,and beware of nova site,it takes long long very long time to download and 50% are all infected,my whole hometown are infected with a new virus called “h4d”,
i never heard of it before,i was going to uplod a pain in the ass virus to free download sites but i was afraid to hurt people just like us…...
but i give you my word that all those infection geeks will fall down someday,maybe we will be theyr’e replacements.
See around mates.

RKane_1 - 18 September 2012 08:53 PM

*sniffle…pout*

With the title of the thread… I thought RawArt had made a new beasty for us from ancient Greece….

*double pout*

Well, perhaps we can feed the virus makers to some of his old beasties. Or would that constitute cruelty to animals, werewolves and zombies?

So true viruses are a PITA. Got one just before DS4.5 was released and had to reformat my PC.
Anyhoot since this is about viruses the following is news on the latest IE bug (trojan loop hole).

Microsoft warns on previously unseen IE bug.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19636382

Also I agree with angusm that viruses are more about underworld business.
Following is another interesting piece of news and scare if you think out it.

Malware inserted on PC production lines, says study
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19585433

Byrdie - 18 September 2012 09:24 PM

RKane_1 - 18 September 2012 08:53 PM

*sniffle…pout*

With the title of the thread… I thought RawArt had made a new beasty for us from ancient Greece….

*double pout*

Well, perhaps we can feed the virus makers to some of his old beasties. Or would that constitute cruelty to animals, werewolves and zombies?

No, I don’t think it would be cruelty…but even those critters are too picky to munch down on that group of slimeoids…

Oh I was definitely infected. The bugger dug its way into my root sectors and prevented the computer from booting properly.

I usually have a couple virus detectors running on this machine, so it is hard to get infected. The only thing with this one was that I was not paying too close attention to where i downloaded this program from, and it came from a site that I didnt know.
So I really can’t blame anyone but myself.
I am usually so paranoid about downloading stuff on this machine, because well…I make my living off of this machine, so when its down….everything comes to a stop.

Well..its clean now…time to reinstall all my virus detectors