Re: [Thinkpad] OT: My viral experience

If you typed in your password when it asked for it, you may want to change
it. If not you may be unknowingly sending out many porn emails when you
are logged off. It happened to me once years ago on AOL.

Ed

At 12:26 AM 9/29/2003 -0700, Ellis Weiner wrote:
>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 11:10:59 2003