Virus Warning.... wally@cknife.com

Marion David Poff

Marion David Poff

Joined
Oct 8, 1998
Messages
5,403
I know that this is probably the wrong forum but I think this needs to get out....

I received a message from ....

wally@cknife.com

With a message of.....


Hi! How are you?

I send you this file in order to have your advice

See you later. Thanks
Click to expand...

with an attachment, when I tried to open it, I got a virus alert.
 
I've been targeted with that one about 30 times in the past week. Norton Antivirus double tapped it in the forehead every time!
 
Last Tuesday I came home from work to find my wife anxiously pacing the floor and my computer whiz brother-in-law typing furiously at this terminal.
She got an e-mail(one of dozens she receives every week) and opened it. It contained that damned simcam virus.
It immediately rewrote every registry so every .exe file opened the virus also.
After getting rid of the virus, my brother-in-law had to re-install the entire operating system on our puter.
This bloody thing is straight from Hell and should not be taken lightly.

My brother-in-law also had some very recent horror stories of others on his forums who lost their entire store of files to this thing.:mad:
 
Hey Guys...

I've been hit with this at 24 times in the last week or so..
I believe in most cases the senders didn't even know they were infected,,nor did they know they were sending anything...

The terrible Grammer is pretty much what tipped me off, as I usually don't use any virus protection on my system...
I'm VERY careful of what I open...

For this particular virus and the fact my wife is using my business computer more and more,,she has been forbidden to open ANY attachments What So Ever, and also have install Norton on my system.......

As with the rest,, it'll pass,, but be careful....

ttyle

Eric....
 
Well, I must admit like an idiot I opened the file without any antivrus running. I got the Spanish version of Sircam. A short while later none of my .exe files would work. Luckily I had made a file backup the day before receiving the email so I formatted the hard drive and rebuilt the whole system. This is a wicked little virus and totally put my pc on its knees. Trust me, no more attachements will be opened by me unless I know they are coming before hand and are safe. Plus, Norton is running at full blast now.

Jeff
 
This should probably be in Community....

I want to ask all the computer experts their opinon on the virus scanners available, specifically Norton & McAfee.

Which would you use, and why?

I currently run McAfee, but I see a lot of people running Norton.

I'd sure like to run the best one I can, so any input is appreciated.
 
Norton. Hands down.
My brother-in-law got the latest version of McAfee, trying to rid himself of this simcam crap, and it ran for a long time on the first use, so he checked his drive to see the progress and found it only "completed" 3% of his hard drive. This was suspicious to him so he stopped it and re-booted whereupon he discovered that only 3% of his hard drive was still intact. 97% of his HD was scrambled big time. Why? I don't know, but he said that if it had finished it's little task his HD would have been screwed big time. Trashed...dead...fini...terminally ill...you get the pic.
Anyway, he got on the horn to McAfee, or rather, he ATTEMPTED to get on the horn with them. He tried e-mail. He tried fax. The one and only response he got was they are "not taking customer service calls at this time."
He was able to get his mess fixed (he's a computer geek) and got online only to find that many others were experiencing this same problem. Some had computer fatal results and ended up having to get new motherboards, new puters or whatever.
I found this out as he was here purging our system of the simcam virus-from-Hell disease.
I honestly don't know much about puters, so please don't ask me techy type questions. I'm only relaying info I got from him.

Good Luck and put those anti-virus programs on RED-ALERT or CODE 3.:D
 
HEy,

Funny you should bring this up. I started hacking a few years ago, as in making viruses and crap like that. DUMB! Its a bunch of bull once you get past the ego part. Lame I stopped that bad stuff and now just am happy that I know C++ so well and that I can protect myself from just about anything anyone would try, since I could probably make it myself. :) Also making progz is really cool!

Anyways, just get a good norton or McAfee Virus scanner and leave it ON! Don't just have it detect opened files since someone could still port attack you. Be careful with weird emails, do what I do, DELETE! :)

later guys,
FLY GUY
 
To me, Norton is much more businesslike (McAfee's site is like visiting friggin' AOL...)

The first solution is to get away from Microsoft Mail Clients like Inbox, Outlook and Outlook Express. It won't completely protect you, but it's like trying to catch a cold in Cabo San Lucas at that point...

Hell, get away from Microsoft completely...

Mac, Linux, OS2, IBMDOS, Timex Sinclair; anything else for goodness sake...

;)
 
Let me preface this by saying that I'm a network engineer. I take care of hundreds of computers, all wired together. Viruses spread quickly in this kind of environment, so I have a little experience here.

My first recommendation would be throw out the “less-than-optimal” operating systems. Windows NT, Unix, and OS/400 are heavy duty and virus resistant. Windows 95, 98 and ME are all pretty much junk from a security perspective. Windows2000 Professional has also proven to be pretty virus resistant. Just stay away from accessories like Microsoft Internet Information Server and other utility programs. Microsoft can write a good business operating system, but doesn’t excel at writing programs. They tend to have a lot of bugs and security leaks.

I currently use Macafee Antivirus. It’s done well so far. I’m not totally blown away by it, but it does the job. Norton Antivirus tends to slow TCP/IP networks to a grinding halt, so Norton was not a realistic option. Best of all, the evaluation version 4 of Macafee for Windows NT is free, still supported, and never expires. It’s free and stops the viruses.

So in conclusion, I use Macafee Antivirus and Windows NT for the PCs on my network. Email and other outside communications are run from an IBM AS/400. Only a single PC out of 500 has been hit with a virus in the last three years. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. :)
 
How do you have Norton configured that is would grind fast ethernet to a halt? My network screams, Using the Corporate Enterprise version of Norton.

Also, personally, and being responsible for a network heavy in NT, I don't see it as being particularly virus resistant, unless you apply the security patches as released, and hopefully in time. The true key to virus avoidance in these modern kiddy-hacker days is through the prevention of email delivery. Next to that you do have to provide the best possibel security agains hackers. OS/400 is fine if you have an AS/400. But Unix, now that's a sound recommendation.

Better yet, Linux Servers running Apache, and choose yer flavor...

:D
 
This is an area I have worked in for a long time also. Using a flavor of Unix, in my opinion, is the ONLY way to go.

I have yet to see an acceptable product from Microsoft. I helped roll out NT for a large company that I used to work for, and it was (and still is) a nightmare. 95, 98, etc., are just variants of the same old thing.

For the PC, either Linux or one of the BSD variants can be locked down very, very tight. It is also a trivial matter to build a "sandbox" so that if a virus does get by, it can't go anywhere or do anything, and is very easy to wipe out. That is what I do, as I type this I'm running Linux on a home network.

Look at the latest "code red" virus that afflicts MS IIS servers. Compare IIS to Apache in terms of both performance and security, and you'll see what I mean.

This topic is just as "religious" as knives! :D
 
we use Trend Scanmail for Microsoft Exchange on our system, it blocks viruses and any sort of attachments we like on the server end before they reach the client.

We're still getting hit with SirCam a lot, but none of them have gotten through. We learned our lesson with the ILOVEYOU virus.

"Our users wouldn't be stupid enough to click on THAT attachment, especially after we warned them!"

"You have 2500 New Unread Messages!"

DOH
 
Actually, any NT based machine (NT4 or 2000) running NTFS partitions is inherently virus resistant. The default securities and inherent nature of these partitions prevent many viruses from spreading. Most hackers code viruses assuming a FAT partition, just because FAT has such a large installed base. Once that virus encounters NTFS, it often comes to a screaming halt. Lots of viruses can kill a FAT machine, but will not effect an NT machine. NTFS, while having certain drawbacks, is a huge leap in security over FAT. People who love their FAT based operating systems, and have no wish to learn Unix or Linux or…. Hehehe…..OS/2……… feel pretty comfortable with NT based systems.

NT is pretty good, assuming you use NTFS partitions. The second you make a boot or system partition out of FAT, you just killed yourself.

As far as rolling out NT on a network, it’s actually very smooth. Much smoother than one of the FATs. NT is a natural networker. You just have to know what you’re doing. There’s a good amount of prep work that can be done ahead of time to ensure success.

Oh yah. I’m speaking of NT Workstation used as a workstation. I’m not too hot on NT servers used as anything other than file and print sharing servers. The minute you put a resident running program on one…… you better put in for some major on-call overtime. But the critical programs are what AS/400 is for anyways. I just fired up AS/400 Domino email the other day. Wow!!!!

On the Norton subject, I can’t remember what version of Norton I tested. I had manufacturers send in samples for me to evaluate. Norton degraded the performance of DOS programs over TCP/IP by an astounding amount. Stuff that took 30 seconds to normally run turned into 4-hour routines. Yuk. This was a couple of years ago. Hopefully Symantec woke up and smelled the coffee.
 
I don't open attachments unless I know they are coming and from who they are sent. I forward anything I'm not sure about to my Hotmail address, as Hotmail has a virus checker built in.
So get a Hotmail address and use their free virus checker.:)
 
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