Re: [Thinkpad] OT: My viral experience

GoBack will not remove the infected files, so you still need to run some
kind of virus removal
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ellis Weiner" <eweiner@nni.com>
To: "ThinkPad group" <thinkpad@stderr.org>
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 3:26 AM
Subject: [Thinkpad] OT: My viral experience

> First, many thanks to all who wrote (in capitals or not). And I'm
> doubly stupid because I remember reading everyone's advice about never
> clicking an email with an exe file.
>
> In any case, here's how I got clean, because it may prove instructive:
>
> 1. I did what Deanna said, and renamed my address book files.
> 2. I went to Symantec and ran their virus scan. We went out to dinner
> and a play (Tony Kusher's Homebody/Kabul here in LA. AVOID IT AT ALL
> COSTS.) and came back 6 hours later. The scan had looked at 43,097
> files, and found two to be infected. But it seemed to be still
> scanning. It assured me I would get a complete analysis when it
> finished. There was a tiny sliver of white in the Progress thermometer,
> but Jeez. Six hours? My hard drive light only occasionally was
> flickering, and the file being scanned, and that number of files
> examined, just didn't budge. I hit Help, to see if they talked about
> that. And the whole scan window disappeared. Not minimized; gone. It
> was as though the scan had never taken place. (There was also an
> annoying little toolbar of save/print/compose/etc. icons which did
> nothing useful. I hit Save, thinking it would give me a file of info
> about the infections. It saved a GIF picture of the scan illustration.)
>
> 3. So, even though I'd gone to Symantec's virus cure page (with the two
> columns of fixes, alphabetically and chronologically), I didn't know
> which one to use. The scan hadn't (yet) told me what I had.
> 4. I was prepared to run the whole thing again, overnight. Then I
> remembered...
> 5. GoBack, which I"d used once before. I copied the work I'd done today
> (ie, Sun.) on three files in Word, to a floppy, copied a couple recent
> emails, and sent the sumbitch back to midnight of Saturday--before the
> accursed "Microsoft" email w/ the virus ever arrived.
> 6. It worked. The window demanding all my email info hasn't
> reappeared. I think I"m okay.
>
> Apologies to anyone whom I may have infected. I did act as soon as I
> got your warnings, and stayed offline during the six hours (the scan
> program had downloaded and ran offline.)
>
> I'm peeved at Symantec, though, for such an iffy procedure. It's nice
> that it's free, etc., but maybe it needs tweaking. I'll never know if
> it was completing the scan, or just stuck prior to completion and not
> getting there.
>
> I'm keeping Justin's and Deanna's emails with their suggestions as to
> which virus it is, so if it starts acting up, I'll run those cures.
>
> And now back to actual ThinkPad matters. Thanks again to all.
>
> Ellis Weiner
>
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Received on Mon Sep 29 08:00:02 2003