DemonGoddess

Just run a-squared, and it'll be fine. Ignore the other. I never did run it myself, as a-squared was finding everything. As to posting this elsewhere, of course I don't mind. The more who know what this thing is, and how to kill it, the better. heh, my hard drive woes get even better from this nasty thing. Not only did it eat the master boot record, it corrupted the boot sector to where it's having trouble for Windows to ID the capacity. CMOS sees it just fine, but the OS keeps changing the drive capacity. So, off it goes back to the factory. It literally scrambled my drive. I was at least able to retrieve my data, so that's always a good thing. And Vista? Absolutely WORTHLESS OS. Have it on the laptop, and hate it. My old P4 (which is this machine I'm working from now) runs much faster, and has less cpu power. The laptop has a dual core and should be much faster than this. It's NEVER run faster than my old homemade desktop. Can't load up programs and such to do work like I can in XP, a host of other issues I have with that operating system. Of course, there's always the little factoid that Microsoft just gave up on it, and is already putting a NEW OS in beta, because they can't FIX the problems in Vista. Which, if you think about it, is how XP came about. They couldn't fix Win2k which was a memory leaker, among other things. ME wasn't designed to be upgraded much, which was too bad. Hence the development of XP to fix the problems with both. Mind you, they still didn't even get THAT one quite right until SP2.

Sorry for the delay, had some machine issues over the last 5 days.... Anyway, this user who plagiarized you has been taken care of.

in originals-- A Lesson Learned Belongs in cartoons

Sorry about that, been in the middle of recovering my hard drive data before I reformat and reinstall everything. Big drive, so it takes time.

Like I said, what happens is that this particular virus hides itself in a number of things. ActiveX controls being one of them. So, I had to find where I put my old 40gb (and hope it was still bootable). That worked, thankfully. Then, I started getting all my working data. Ran out of media. So NOW I'm ftp'ing it up to my site domain. UGH.

all gone...

Yes, it can be killed if caught early. However, if it infects your master boot record, and goes into the rootkit directory, you'll have to reformat. No way around it. Hopefully, if that's the case, you'll have found it in time to at least salvage your working files and documents. Mind you, I THOUGHT I caught it at that point. But, turns out I did not, so I'm having to retrieve data before I reformat my drive. Good thing I've got other booting hard drives not being used. Something else to please, PLEASE remember, is that it doesn't just spread via IM programs. It also spreads via ads, browser tool bars, and ActiveX controls.

Including a link to the image would be fine. It is, in fact, the only way to do it. Just remember that not all the users are going to know that they have to copy/paste the link in the browser bar, and that it might be a good idea to tell them that as well.

You're all very welcome. @Revu--I feel yer pain...I also did this for a living for many, many years. But not for individual users so much, as for network operations. BUT, much better to alert our users, and have the ones who CAN fix it and catch it in early stages do exactly that. Now, if it's a later stage infection, and it's infected the rootkit directory, all that can be done then is a clean install of the OS. Which is exactly what I was trying to avert for myself, and did, thankfully. Something else I forgot to mention is that of all the browsers, Internet Explorer is the most vulnerable, due to ActiveX controls. The rogues and trojans LIKE to disguise themselves as ActiveX controls. Of course, no browser is completely invulnerable, but IE is the weakest.

dunno how I missed this one... To Be Held Displays only disclaimer, there is very likely uploaded content that is not only scrambled, but because of that, it makes itself hidden.

Unfortunately, ALL the IM programs have some vulnerabilities. AIM (as much as I don't care for it) is likely the safest of the three most commonly used, but it's also got vulnerabilities. As far as I know, the ONLY antivirus program that will actually catch these things immediately, and is not either completely disabled or partially disabled, is Kaspersky. It could be that it would only partially disable Norton (similar to how Avira responds to it) but as I've not used that program for a number of years myself, I couldn't say with certainty. This bug completely disables the following: AVG Avast MacAfee Spybot Search & Destroy Malwarebytes SuperAntiSpyware The above are all very good programs, but you see why this would be a problem. There are many more that this program will disable, but I can't think of 'em off the top of my head.

They can actually use MSN, they just have to be careful. Having a good malware scanner (and using it) will help. Thing is, these bugs look for and exploit known program vulnerabilities. That's the way they've always worked, regardless of the program they exploit. The other thing to remember, and I cannot stress this enough, is no browser toolbars. i.e. google, yahoo, crawler, just to name a few. The things are trojan magnets.

First of all, this thing is a variant of Antivirus 2008/2009. It's got an interesting way of spreading itself, via IM, primarily MSN Messenger (any flavor). My daughter got my machine infested entirely by accident while chatting in MSN IM. Didn't click any links, accept any file transfers, nothing like that. She was simply chatting, and then all of sudden, there it was. So, been trying to clean this beastie OUT for the last few days. Here's the thing.. I deleted all associated files, killed all associated processes, and deleted all associated registry entries. NORMALLY, that will then allow a user to then run their anti malware software. Well, this thing is also a TSR, so while I did all that, it still didn't kill it enough to disable it. Which means that none of my malware removal stuff would work. As it turns it all OFF. This also tends to turn off most antivirus programs. Two of the few exceptions that I know of are Kaspersky and Avira. With Avira (I use it, so have experienced what'll happen), it turns off the Antivirus guard section. Simple enough fix, you simple turn the service back on, and the program will then continue to work as it should. So, in an effort to de-infest my machine, found a malware utility that is free, and that this thing not only doesn't turn off, the program then finds it in the memory, deletes all instances, and then your machine is once again free from the nasty. A-Squared Free This program offers a 2-in-1 package, or simply the malware removal tool.

Coulda SWORN I had a general category in final fantasy anime. urrk. Anyhoo....will get to all this a bit later, if not tomorrow.

To do that, requires a more powerful search engine than what is currently there. Simply put, the current search can only give you a max of 100 results at a time. It's not designed to parse a database that's 6.5GB and growing, and in all honesty can only handle MAYBE 300MB of database data. That's spread across several subdomains. We do have the search engine for the big db we have, but have not ported it in, nor will be in this version. It is code version dependent, which means it's not going to work so well with the software currently in place.

mouse, the name of the show is High Mountain Rangers, not Jesse Hawkes, right? Just clarifying..

that's easy enough to fix. You go in to your user panel, select the "noavatar" option (there's an actual file for it) and then you won't have one until you decide what you want to have later.

As memory serves, in the forum, it doesn't actually overwrite your old avatar, but it does orphan it. So what ends up happening is when I run the utility to clean out the orphan attachments for the forum, the orphaned avatars are deleted then. As to removing your current avatar in the archive, I would need the file name so I can delete it for you.

uhhhhhhh...... gotta say, sounds an awful lot like that person has a ginormous ego that needs fed.

send it to forums@adult-fanfiction.org

Sure, if I can't find it, you can always email it to me and I can ftp it up. If you're running Vista as your operating system, that is likely the problem.

I just love (NOT) when the kiddies wonder just WHY the hell their accounts were deleted...that's what these were, leftovers from minor deletions.

I'll have a look in the directory and see if your upload was even successful.

Definitely something for the awards group to discuss. tks

np, I'll kill 'em in a bit.