Thanks Apocalypse_67, will do that again and maybe go online to another software maker and do an online one. It's just annoying, as I hope it doesn't mean another clean installation - will be the third for the year if so! >

Dude formatting is the best solution u should do it about every 3 months if needed it helps trust me

 

#3 by goodmorphing - 5/19/2003 1:02:05 AM Um.... these days some worms and viri can disable your own virus protection. To be really sure, go to a good on-line virus scan and run that. Norton has one, McAfee does too. They are free.

Listen to GM.  I had a worm on my home machine that disabled Norton, put exclusions in it for all the places it spread itself to, and then took over the auto-update files so that Norton couldn't pull updates to get rid of it.

I would suggest running Mcafee's online virus scan.  It's free to scan with, but you have to pay for it to get rid of the infected files.

#4 by Citizen ponz14 - 5/19/2003 4:56:26 AM Dude formatting is the best solution u should do it about every 3 months if needed it helps trust me

What?!  I wouldn't follow that advise.  There are *very* few times that you should ever have to reformat.  It's just a waste of time and energy. 

The worm that I got on my machine was the first one that I ever got at home, and I've never been hacked.  It also took no time at all to recover from it.  Reformatting and restoring would have taken days with no better results than just cleaning the worm.

I run Norton Systemworks 2003 and Norton Personal Firewall 2003 and keep them updated at all times. Several times people have tried to send me a virus or worm in an email and it has been destroyed by Norton Antivirus before it could be downloaded to my computer. Also, most hackers use some type of scanner to just go through a whole range of IP addresses looking for an opening. They don't specifically target YOUR computer but if their scanner detects a way in they will take it. My NPF detects numerous attempts every single day of people trying to hack into my computer using Trojan horses usually and gives me detailed reports of each attempt including the IP address of the person making the attempt. They come from all over the world and many of them are right here in my local area on the same ISP as myself. I complained to my ISP about this but they couldn't care less about it and did absolutely nothing. If you have a broadband connection and don't take adequate measures to protect yourself you are leaving yourself open to all sorts of malicious attacks.

It's quite common to get hacked, but most of the time, people who hack into your system mainlynwant to set up a FTP site to use your computer as a warez server. It's happened to me twice before, and I ended up with a few gigabytes of MP3's and pirated applications.  I have since then installed Zone Alarm and that took care of that.  Using just XP's built-in firewall doesn't cut it, that's what I had before.

So, in short, hackers aren't interested into deleting files and shortcuts on your system, they want to use your system for warez. So I doubt that's what your problem is.

Ive used McAfee Personal Firewall Plus which has a cool little tracking function built in so you can see where the presumed hack attempt originated from. I quit using when we got DSL cause it wasnt compatible. But when I had it, It worked quite well and stopped all sorts of unwanted communications. I use McAfee VirusScan Online on the desktops and Norton Anti-Virus 2003 on my laptop. Id rather have McAfee Virus Scan 7 Pro, but then again, Its not really worth it cause Norton works just fine.

Styl Skinner: if you don't download illegal software its hard to imagine you have a 'worm' or virus, it also can come trough mail, but if yo scan your system, your virus scanner should come up with something, if it dasn't, just read post #5

See my post above about the worm that I had that took out Norton.  Worms are a lot trickier than they used to be.  They typically install backdoors.

You can get viruses (especially worms) from more sources than email and files.  They propagate through shared drives, some through remote desktop when you connect local drives, and some can even get to you from infected websites if you don't have proper security.  Read up on that type of information on the support pages of virus protection software.

If you are curious about where pings and port probes come from, check out BlackIce.  It will also allow you to ban IP addresses when they become bothersome.  It also tells you the severity of that action that is happening.  Some behavior that looks like a hack is actually normal behavior.

Paxx is correct, however.  Hackers want to place warez on your machine and use you as a file server.  They typically go after anonymous FTPs on company servers, however (more space and bandwidth).

It is very naive of anyone to think that they will be free of viri so long as they do not frequent sleazy warez site. We have a machine that is used to run an outdoor sign... scrolls news headlines. It became infected with sircam not once but 3 times. considering this machine does not actually surf the net or even partake in email, it shows you that worms are smart (or worm writers). It even infects norton on the machine. the only way we could stop it is to upgrade away from win9x but the sign client will not run on NT, 2k or XP. Sircam isn't even a new breed of worm.

I just did a lot to my system and found out a few wierd things.

I used norton Anti virus...All clean
I used ad aware and it came back with 57 programs so I got rid of all them
Then I installed Sygate Personal firewall so I hope that helps to.

Kona, a all clean doesn't mean much if your virus signatures aren't up to date. Once, I had a virus on my system and the virus scanner didn't detect it until I updated the signatures.

Also try, SpyBot Search & Destroy, it will get many things that Ad-aware missed, as well as registry orphans that Norton Utilities missed, I guarantee you, and it is free too.

20 by Mr ChasUGC - 5/20/2003 8:32:52 PM Kona, a all clean doesn't mean much if your virus signatures aren't up to date. Once, I had a virus on my system and the virus scanner didn't detect it until I updated the signatures

There are worms out there (like one that I had) that are not detected by Norton and will actually infect Norton (they take over the auto-update function.)  Here is an example of the type of worm I am referring to:  http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=100143

No email or warez sites needed to get infected with that puppy.

I had Norton up to date and still got it.  Mcafee picked it up right away and got rid of it.  No virus protection is 100% reliable.

However, worms are not that destructive, typically.  They just spread like crazy and will bring your system to a crawl.  A lot will install a backdoor, however, which will create a security breach.  They also spread through shared drives, so they are a bit trickier to detect.  Once the worm was found and extracted, everything was fine and dandy on my machine.  Just took a couple hours of cursing before it was all happy again.

It never hurts to scan with a different virus scanner if there is a question of infection.