Vex Star

dammit, hour and a half worth of work down the drain

didn’t install antivirus first…then got hit with xp antivirus - which is not an antivirus program, it just looks like one

i learned my lesson

1) antivirus + newest updates (turn on firewall first also)
2) windows updates
3) then install your software etc
Funny that, I always install the updates first then the av and never had any problems.
But then being behind a router helps
lol….how the fuck did this happen? I’ve always been fine with it…then again I usually do the anti-virus before I connect to the interwebs anyways. I always activate the AV via phone. You don’t want those hackers getting your anti-virus confirmation number

.

the lesson which should’ve been learned is never hook your computer up to the internet without a router/firewall inbetween
i had windows firewall on and i’m behind a router. the problem was cracked software, thats the last time i’ll install downloaded shit for someone

that’s why stealing shit is bad. you can never trust that stuff. they are obviously not on the up and up already when they are willing to crack software. it is only one step away from putting a virus/trojan in there that will compromise your system.

well then duh
Honestly that could’ve been avoided had you been more careful with what you downloaded. I’ve been running with nothing but Windows Firewall for quite some time and I’ve had no problems.
i’m just not going to do favors for friends anymore. i’m starting a new job on monday and about 3 people hit me up in the last 2 weeks to fix their computers before i left

as sad as it is, sometimes it just isn’t worth it. working on computers and cars. with both you get harassed all the time.
I’ve never needed to install an anti-virus on my mac

1) Never hook up your PC to the interwebs until you at least have a good antivirus set up.

2) Always beware of downloaded software. 95% of my problems with virii came from programs I DLed from shady places.
I’ve always done windows, drivers from a CD/flash drive, latest service pack from cd/flash drive, av from cd/hard drive and plug in the network cable to get the av updates, then hit microsoft update.

That’s because viruses, like 99% of other binaries, won’t run on OSX. Who says security through obscurity doesn’t work?

I’ve never had to install antivirus on my PalmPilot either. Woooo!

DO you know where you got that from? I know - why ask - we got hit with it a week ago on some laptops and we’re trying to figure out whether our newest policies would prevent it from being installed.

It’s no wonder Firefox is getting their share of viruses written for it now. OSX will get hit more often as well.

I doubt OSX will get hit more often. Nobody takes it seriously. OSX just isn’t an operating system used by people who need to get work done.

from what i’ve read it comes from a video codec exploit when you visit a site. in my case, there was some nice crapware combine with dvdfab5 that visits a site right after installation. if you don’t have antvirus installed or the latest updates, it gets hit with the exploit and installs xp antivirus.

xp antivirus fucks everything up. it changes your wallpaper, then disables yours tabs in display properties to set it back, it runs in background, it looks like a real antivirus program and even starts "scanning" and reports about fake viruses etc
slipstreaming antivirus FTW

(but it sucks when they move on to a newer version)

*cough*
Even A/V mastering doesn’t have to be done on a Mac anymore to come out right, and that was Apple’s one legitimate business market. What do they have left besides the more-money-than-brains crowd?

they have the ignorant windows crowd whose constant whining about OSX makes the people who like OSX become even more adamant about their choice in operating system.

Fair enough, there’s always the fanboi crowd.

I’m not a Windows fanboy, I’m not convinced of its inherent superiority or anything like that; in fact, I’m usually the guy who will pick any alternative to the crowd-favorite if there’s any way I can justify doing so, but in this case I just can’t justify using OSX or *nix as my primary OS. My preference for Windows is based entirely on its relative ease of use (in particular, when making advanced changes to policies) and the indisputably massive software library available for it. OSX is easy to use and *nix has a huge software library, but neither has both at once, and Windows does. If the price for that is I have to hand off a few CPU cycles to an antivirus program, so be it.
stupid ignorant question comin up but screw it i’ll ask anyway

say i format/fresh-install a machine from scratch (XP or Vista) using the original discs and dont run ANY outside/downloaded programs at all. if i connect the virgin machine to the internet and let it sit there for a couple hours and don’t browse any websites or run any programs at all, will it get "infected"? how are viruses these days able to screw up your machine without you having to run infected executables? exploit bugs in the OS? i’m probably way out of the loop

there are security holes in the OS. people have port scanners running looking for open services on your PC. some of these services allow someone to run malicious code if they aren’t properly secured.

MS basically coded in a back-door to your OS, and didn’t really tell anyone about it. They thought it was secure, but it wasn’t, and so without your doing anything other than connecting to the internet with a virgin install, you can and will get raped horribly by trojans and viruses

actually, OSX has the largest library of software available to it of any current OS. it can run every app written for OSX as well as every app writted for Windows if you use VMWare Fusion or Parallels to run Windows. the same can be said of Apple hardware since you can dual boot both OSX and Windows. you can also compile all kinds of open source applications much easier than you can for Windows since most are written for linux and the BSD internals make porting incredibly easy.

but, if you look at all of the software that people are actually using, there isn’t a huge difference between OSX and Windows. you have your word processors, spreadsheet apps, email, current web browsers and all of the appropriate plug-ins, database servers, audio and video creation/playing/editing apps, photo viewing and editing apps… the only thing you miss really is games, but Apple’s hardware allows you to run XP or Vista natively and it runs it as well as any other vendor’s hardware.

Without the firewall turned on, definitely. However I’m not sure how many updates happened to the firewall since it was released. I know it doesn’t respond to pings OOB which a number of these viruses check first for, and the firewall does close most of the inbound ports.

It would be an interesting experiment - to be fair, you would have to turn off automatic updates, turn on the firewall and THEN plug it in. I think I’ll try that at work tomorrow outside our firewall
good to know. thanx for the info guys.. are these virus problems common for Vista too or just XP?
Most of the patches released for XP apply to Vista as well - at least from the security bulletins I recieve. I think with UAC on, they shouldn’t be nearly as malicious but I have no real world experience with Vista and AV.

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September 26th, 2008 | Tags: cough, cracked software, downloaded software, firewall, huge software library, Linux, massive software library, open source applications, operating system, software etc, web browsers, word processors | Category: general | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL