From: RayLopez99 on
On Mar 23, 6:45 pm, "Cyborg-HAF" <Cyborg_...(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> My brothers home PC was hit by a hacked button on website that he visited
> daily for a year or more.  His WindowsXP SP3 was attacked by Ransomware that
> put a big blurb on the his desktop about needing some fictional antivirus
> and it trashed his Microsoft Office and some of his Windows stuff.  I ran a
> full scan on his system with his Norton 360 and it fixed the Windows problem
> and desktop blurb but had to reinstall Office and a couple other programs
> trashed.  It wasn't a Trojan or something Antivirus could stop since it ran
> when he hit link on a normally safe webpage and he didn't do something risky
> to do.  His is the only system attacked like that I've personally seen;
> that is one threat that I've read about in a PC World Security Threats

OK, fine, but essentially your brother accidentally installed a
program he should not have had--kind of like those junk shareware
programs that infect your registry and can never be removed, even
after Uninstall (I have a few myself). But strictly speaking I would
not call this a true virus or rootkit.

And it could happen to somebody in Linux land (accidental installation
of a program).

Anybody else? So far nobody has proved a serious true virus infection
has occurred on a Windows machine.

RL
From: RayLopez99 on
On Mar 23, 7:08 pm, BluesBoy <guitar4je...(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> That sounds outlandish to me too.  Must be doing some things wrong.  The
> only time I ever got a virus on one of my windows PCs was back when I had
> win3.11 and got some fonts off of a shareware CD.  The version of Norton I
> had at the time found it and cleaned it fine.  I have never had any of my
> personal PCs infected since.  Of course I have run Linux since '98 on my
> primary workstation.  Although, I always have some win PCs around as well
> and use windows at work.
>

Thanks BB. This sounds believable. I have no doubt that Linux has
fewer viruses than Windows, any way you count it (by number or by
percent of programs), but that's only IMO due to Linux's smaller
market share.

But so far nobody has proved that viruses are a serious problem in
Windows.

RL

From: larry moe 'n curly on


RayLopez99 wrote:
>
> On Mar 23, 3:24 pm, "larry moe 'n curly" <larrymoencu...(a)my-deja.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I was running AVG ver. 8 and got some malware that hogged all the CPU
> > time.  It caused operation to slow so much that I couldn't run the
> > computer and had to transfer the HD to a computer with a dual core
> > CPU.  A full scan with AVG indicated the problem but couldn't fix it.
> > Norton detected nothing, and free online scans by Trend and PC Pit
> > Stop didn't fix it (I don't remember if they detected it), but Bit
> > Defender partially did, and the rest of the problem was solve with
> > either ComboFix or SmithFraudFix.
>
> What OS? What year? What was the name of the virus if I can ask?
> That sounds incredible.

XP Home 32-bit, before Feb. 18, 2008, and I can't remember.
From: bbgruff on
On Tuesday 23 March 2010 19:53 RayLopez99 wrote:

> Anybody else?  So far nobody has proved a serious true virus infection
> has occurred on a Windows machine.

So have you talked to Manchester City Council or the Greater Manchester
Police Dept. now? What did they say? Was it all a hoax, and they coughed
up nearly £2,000,000 between them on that account?

From: bbgruff on
On Tuesday 23 March 2010 20:03 RayLopez99 wrote:

> Anybody else?  So far nobody has showed there's a real threat from
> viruses in Windows land, just a few isolated examples, and a few
> replies are like mine:  no viruses ever, or in years...

http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/government-law/public-sector/news/index.cfm?newsId=15477

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/8492669.stm