Virus!

Norton Anti-Virus has detected one on my system, it was unable to delete or do anything to combat it really..it just adviced me to not open a file with lots of chars like "HAU2J23JB4HJ." something. It doesn't seem to be affecting my PC in anyway. I'm not sure where this file is located..although the virus protector said somethin bout IE5...then a bunch of stuff that made no sense. Should I just leave it, as it isn't causing any trouble (as of yet) or should I reformat and back everything up? Thx!
:D

you should at least know if it quarantined it. if it did don't worry about it but try and delete it. you should find the path, boot in up in dos and delete it.

Get it off your system ASAP. It might not seem to be harming anything now, but it could be a ticking time bomb just waiting to wipe your hard drive. Also I make a copy on 3.5 " disc for further study of the virii. I usually use them to test my virus protection. So far Norton has detected all of them, except one which I disguised as a copy of MS "Solitare" or sol.exe. It will delete the mbr. I found it on a partitioning disc when I was in a peripherals class. It caused ud 6 hours of pain.

If the filename is a lot of jibberish, and it mentions IE, then it is probably IE's cache. This could be the IE attack that Nimda launches.

No matter whether you see anything wrong with your computer or not, make sure you are clean! Sure you don't see anything, but someone could easily have slipped a trojan on your computer and is watching everything you do, grabbing all your passwords, etc. Go to http://www.antivirus.com and click on home user and click on the housecall service to get your computer scanned by a second source (for free too).

Could someone take me through the procedures of reformatting my hard drive? Thx

If Norton has it in quarantine no prob and no need to format, altough if you want to back up all your stuff and enter the famous command:
format c

Make a boot floppy, put it in the drive, and restart your comp. When it loads, choose to boot w/ CD-Rom support.

Then do format X (whatever drive you want to format, usually C:).

Make sure you have all personal files backed up and have a OS on CD ready to be installed.

Thx. Would it be possible to rid the virus or whatever it is...by deleting IE5? Cause I did a full system scan and no virus or malicious file was found...but i think it is nestled in IE5. So does anyone thing delteing IE5 might do the trick or do you think it is in multiple places? Thx

Hmm.. never heard of it.:confused:

I got red antipoints for my previous post... wtf?

Doh! Not again!

whoever is giving me red stop it.

Windows doesn't allow you to delete ie5..... ahh..... BILL GATES... what a smart man.... hehe

if it found it on the first pass but not on the second it either cleaned it or quarantined it...check the virus log.

More.. and more REDPOINTS AHAHAHAHAHHAHHH!!


Ok now to note on ie5... It can be taken out of windows 98se and ME..

But your computer will boot up to a blank screen...
U need a shell.. Now if you take the 16bit program manager out of windows 3.x u can set it as shell in the INI and walla.. U dont have to use internet explorer 5 to boot up.. one thing.. i dont know how long it stays stable and yet again 8 character file names baby!!! if you want to get technical its 11.. but whatever.

you need more then a shell to delete it and have it work.... your plan does work, but stay stable for, on average.... maybe 15 minutes (at least the on the pentium 3 we tried it on) there is some guy who wrote a prog that deletes ie and keeps windows running, but he got sued by Microsoft..... but that is quite another story (and very humorous i might add)

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Originally posted by lord_darkside_x
there is some guy who wrote a prog that deletes ie and keeps windows running, but he got sued by Microsoft..... but that is quite another story (and very humorous i might add) [/B]

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Do tell or at least give a link so we (I) can find it.:p

well i don't have a link.... but it was a few years back.... he wrote this prog, and micro$oft sued him. his claim was that his puter ran faster with out ie (i'm not sure what version). Micro$oft ran tests that "showed" windows running faster with it. they showed footage of the tests in court with a video tape. Now here come the funny part, some video editors were watching and called the guys lawyer to inform him that the videos were obviously edited. So the judge ruled in favor of the guy, who then recieved a very large out of court settlement from micro$oft basically buying the prog from him so that he couldn't distribute it. micro$oft is so silly.....

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Originally posted by SolidPez
Thx. Would it be possible to rid the virus or whatever it is...by deleting IE5?

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I don't know about whether it would clear a virus or not, but if you want to have a go and delete IE anyway then i suggest that you try IEradicator It should pretty much do it for you if you download the program.

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Originally posted by SolidPez
Cause I did a full system scan and no virus or malicious file was found...

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Well....have you updated your virus checker recently?
(hate to sound obvious)

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Originally posted by SolidPez
but i think it is nestled in IE5.

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Do you mean actually inside the program, try checking the file size for IE5 with the one microsoft says it should be (sorry don't know the address) if it is in the least bit different, then delete IE5 straight away with the link i said.

Quote:

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Originally posted by SolidPez
So does anyone thing delteing IE5 might do the trick or do you think it is in multiple places? Thx

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I guess it all depends have a look at the sophos site and try the name of that file you said, if the person who made it is clever then they will probably have told it to store itself in several different boot-up places.

Afaik, there was a problem recently with norton anti virus giving false alerts about some web sites (like msn.co.uk) being infected with a trojan. Maybe you should look into that before you format you hard disk.