Viruses that destroyed your system.

[OCGuy]

Someone linked to a site here that gave me that fake AV2008 program or whatever that crap is.

I had to run my company AV twice and malwarebytes once to get rid of it all.

I had to go back to IE because I think it jacked up firefox.

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

Me

 

[OUCaptain]

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: OUCaptain

Originally posted by: lxskllr
Not running A/V on a Windows box is just stupid. If you get a decent product you don't even know it's there....

No, being a moron and opening everything that plops itself into you inbox plus never updating windows is just stupid.

I install anti virus once maybe twice a year for a quick scan then remove it. Low and behold, it's always clean.

You must not do anything with your computer then. I've had my A/V alert just visiting a website...

Either windows or the browser catches it.

edit: I guess the others in this thread with no AV don't do anything with their computer either. Or perhaps you should clicking on links from 4chan

 

[SphinxnihpS]

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: SphinxnihpS

Originally posted by: lxskllr
Not running A/V on a Windows box is just stupid. If you get a decent product you don't even know it's there....

I don't run AV at home. What for? Please explain where I will get this magical virus from?

Email attachments, hacked ad server, thumb drive, mp3 player...

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

I don't open email attachments from people I do not know. I don't visit disreputable websites. I don't download mp3 from just anywhere. I don't stick random thumb drives in my computer. I don't deal with resource-hogging badly-written AV programs which have the same net effect as the viruses they pretend to block. I've gone both ways; tried nearly every AV product out there, and decided years ago to ditch them. All my important data files are backed up on drives that are not normally connected to my system, so if I do ever catch anything bad, it's just a low-level and reinstall away from fixed.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: SphinxnihpS


LOLOLOLOLOLOL

I don't open email attachments from people I do not know. I don't visit disreputable websites. I don't download mp3 from just anywhere. I don't stick random thumb drives in my computer. I don't deal with resource-hogging badly-written AV programs which have the same net effect as the viruses they pretend to block. I've gone both ways; tried nearly every AV product out there, and decided years ago to ditch them. All my important data files are backed up on drives that are not normally connected to my system, so if I do ever catch anything bad, it's just a low-level and reinstall away from fixed.

BRAND NEW thumb drives and mp3 players come from the factory with viruses installed. Just because you've been lucky so far doesn't mean it'll last.

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: SphinxnihpS

Originally posted by: lxskllr

Originally posted by: SphinxnihpS

Originally posted by: lxskllr
Not running A/V on a Windows box is just stupid. If you get a decent product you don't even know it's there....

I don't run AV at home. What for? Please explain where I will get this magical virus from?

Email attachments, hacked ad server, thumb drive, mp3 player...

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

I don't open email attachments from people I do not know. I don't visit disreputable websites. I don't download mp3 from just anywhere. I don't stick random thumb drives in my computer. I don't deal with resource-hogging badly-written AV programs which have the same net effect as the viruses they pretend to block. I've gone both ways; tried nearly every AV product out there, and decided years ago to ditch them. All my important data files are backed up on drives that are not normally connected to my system, so if I do ever catch anything bad, it's just a low-level and reinstall away from fixed.

You're relying 100% on all the "reputable" websites you visit to maintain their sites 100% of the time & never get hacked, even momentarily.

Once upon a time, I would have agreed with you. But these days, the viruses are much more sophisticated.

edit: oh, and by the way, you claimed that "if I do ever catch anything bad, it's just a low-level and reinstall away from fixed."

How the fuck would you even know you had a virus? If someone's writing a virus to steal financial information, passwords, etc., they sure as shit aren't going to make your CD tray open and close, or your screen flash between orange and yellow. They're going to operate as unobtrusively as possible.

edit edit: And, unless you make a new back-up every time, it's very likely that your back-ups will wind up with the virus on them before you ever figure out that you have a virus. Are you really willing to take that chance?!

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: Kalmah

Originally posted by: skyking
Haaahaaaaaaahaaaa! F8 system restore? HAAAAAAAHaaaaHAAAAA!
<breathe>
Haaaaahaa!
I have nuked one computer that had a diabolical baddie that fubared system restore, broke msconfig, denied regedit, would kill any antivirus or executable that did find it and try to kill it.
Granted I have only seen one of these but it was as badass as I could imagine.

I came across one of these on a friends laptop. I even tried running a portable antivirus from a usb drive and it would shut that down instantly upon opening.

probably the same family of nasty.
After It killed a portable AV tool, I got another tool and watched it die with a witness or two. We had a good laugh and nuked that thing from orbit.

 

[yhelothar]

Originally posted by: DrPizza

How the fuck would you even know you had a virus? If someone's writing a virus to steal financial information, passwords, etc., they sure as shit aren't going to make your CD tray open and close, or your screen flash between orange and yellow. They're going to operate as unobtrusively as possible.

I don't exactly know how those viruses work, but wouldn't a firewall prevent that from happening?

 

[JM Aggie08]

nothing a good ol' remote scan couldn't ever fix.

<3 vista pe, plop linux, and usb to sata/ide.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I've been using various linux distros since 2001, and haven't had anything since then.

 

[Praxis1452]

I simply can't be bothered to have A/V running all the time. Every month or whenever things get weird, I reinstall Avira and run a scan. I run spybot S&D every week, and ad-aware every so often as well. Takes care of pretty much everything, without the bloat of an Antivirus.

 

[911paramedic]

What was that one that would shut your system down after a minute? Was it the blaster, or something like that?

Every time I go to my sisters house and log into my brother-in-laws account it has the "blaster removal tool" still on the desktop.

I had to get rid of it, they never could, and I did it from six hundred miles away talking them through it. I would have preferred a nail gun accident to that "family tech support" call.

 

[Exterous]

I wish I was cool enough to not run an anti-virus

 

[Red Squirrel]

I got a virus once, and it was a big risk I took. It was Christmas, I had gotten some new item I can't remember what it is - think it was a video capture device, and I really wanted a program to go with it, so I got the first thing I saw off kazaa. Was a rather large file, opened it, then my PC just started to crap out. The virus writer was actually smart enough to make the file large so it looks more real then some 56k file that says "Adobe Premiere + full codecs1111!!" or something. I had an AV but it did not catch it.

Other then that, I've never had a virus infection. Common sense + AV is a 99.999% stop against viruses.

 

[funkymatt]

Originally posted by: Modelworks

Originally posted by: BeauJangles
I miss the old viruses that just changed every file on your computer into an exe dialer. Or the viruses that did stupid things like replace any instance the letter o with two or three o's. Or the one that made all your icons slowly fall off the bottom of the desktop.

Now all they do is sit silently on your computer and steal your bank info

yeah the old ones were actually kind of cool . I think that is because the programmers have changed. The old ones were done as jokes not meant to really do harm. The new ones are malicious . For the past few months it seems the malware type are dropping but there is a huge increase in keylogging variants.





I run a program called process hacker every day , it is free. It shows all processes running and who they belong to , even the hidden ones that normally don't show up. If you see something there that doesn't belong it is easy to catch.

http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/

that looks an awful lot like process explorer, whats the difference?

 

[HardcoreRobot]

i got some virus through IIS running on my main machine back in college. i was infected and some files already deleted before it was even reported by norton and well before and definitions or fixes came out

 

[PliotronX]

The behavior of viruses (or technically worms now?) seems to have shifted from causing as much damage as possible to trying to make the author money through distributed spamming (using contacts lists etc.) and spyware or stealing credit card info. I haven't run a real-time AV on my main system for about five years and stopped with others a couple of years back. I sometimes scan with ClamAV because it offers some kind of generic heuristics which sounds effective. For everything else I just use Malwarebytes. The first and only virus of note I ever got hit with was called Tai-Pei contracted from Compuserve in '94 and it corrupted half the HDD.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: HardcoreRobot
i got some virus through IIS running on my main machine back in college. i was infected and some files already deleted before it was even reported by norton and well before and definitions or fixes came out

lol I remember IIS, think it was version 5. It was swish cheese. That thing *WAS* a trojan LOL. It was so bad. Think the latest IIS is slightly better. I still would not touch that thing, no reason to when apache is free and runs on Linux.

this still makes me laugh.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: funkymatt

Originally posted by: Modelworks


http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/

that looks an awful lot like process explorer, whats the difference?

It does a lot more , and is updated weekly with new features. It can be used to terminate a virus and stop it from reloading, even the ones that hide very well.

Some of the features:

Object security editor
Wait chain analysis
DLL injection into processes from other sessions
Ability to create services
Ability to set DEP status of processes in other sessions
Ability to unload modules of processes in other sessions
Statistics for token objects
Can bypass all handle-opening protections
Ability to set handle flags such as protect-from-close and inherit
Can close TCP connections
Terminating processes and threads now bypasses all but the most advanced Anti-termination methods
Hidden processes scanner (similar to Blacklight's and IceSword's) which can now detect both Hacker Defender and FU.
New Terminator method: assigns a job object to the process and terminates it
Displays service DLL paths