virus

Published by: Bob; Boston

I have an XP Systemax unit that has worked flawlessly for two years. Until today. I checked my e-mail in the morning and noticed it was a little sluggish, so I rebooted--I admit, it had been a while since my last reboot. When the computer came back up, it was almost at a dead stop. Neither my ZoneAlarm nor AVG Anti-Virus would load. Any program I tried relating to anti-anything would not work, either.

After several reboots I was able to launch AVG and found hundreds of spyware files dumped on my system, from CoolWebSearch to … Read more

Antivirus software vendor Kaspersky is launching an international effort to try to crack the encryption used in a "blackmailer" virus that locks up data on a victim's computer.

The company announced the "Stop the Gpcode Virus" initiative Monday and extended a public invitation to all cryptography experts and other researchers, saying it has sufficient information about the virus to enable experts to begin working on factoring the RSA key.

Kaspersky also created a special forum for the effort.

Kaspersky Lab said last week that it detected a new version of the ransomware type of Gpcode … Read more

Published by Mesila; San Francisco, CA

I recently had unknown malware that was causing Windows to keep rebooting at odd moments. Another thing it did was install a kazillion services and then have all of them running at once. It wasn't something that any scanner would pick up--and being big on file sharing, I've made it a point to keep a whole army of antimalware programs around. I'm assuming the culprit was either one that was new at the time, or a variant that had morphed itself from an older version. Eventually, after a lot of fussing … Read more

This year's major update to user favorite Ad-Aware looks to be more of a course correction from some of the missteps in the 2007 version. The adware and malware detection engine has undergone a significant overhaul, resulting in faster scan times, and the interface has been changed.

The changes to the detection and removal engine will be noticeable to long-time Ad-Aware users, with Lavasoft touting faster scan times and better rootkit detection. New users should notice that the app performs faster than integrated antivirus and antimalware programs, and that's because only the paid version of Ad-Aware comes with … Read more

Submitted by Scott, Vernon Hills, Ill.

This past April, a friend of mine, Jeff, called me on a Saturday afternoon, letting me know that I was instant messaging him right then. I obviously wasn't. He said that after some lines of basic text, I acted panicked and asked for money to be wired to an African bank account, which Jeff knew immediately was bad news for the real me.

I immediately changed some passwords in key accounts and found that my Hotmail account had been mysteriously compromised. The evildoers had got a ton of my contacts and sent out … Read more

Anti-virus software is a necessary evil (unless you're a Mac or Linux user, am I right?), but it doesn't have to be a costly one. Witness Grisoft's AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, which offers robust virus protection without any money changing hands.

The just-released version 8.0 includes a spiffier, easier interface and a new feature called LinkScanner, which promises protection from malicious links returned by Web searches. Better still, AVG 8.0 adds anti-spyware to the mix, bringing it closer to that other free anti-virus favorite, Avast. (The latter includes rootkit protection as well, which AVG still … Read more

Apparently JavaOne got an infection. Here is the note from the conference team.

The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held … Read more

Sun Microsystems has bragged for 13 years now that Java security features keep the programming technology virus-free. Apparently, the same doesn't hold for the JavaOne trade show.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health put out a release Thursday with an alert that "several" people had become ill after attending or working at conferences at the city's Moscone Convention Center between April 30 and Thursday. That includes the time when the JavaOne confab took over the space. JavaOne opened its doors on Sunday and ends Friday.

The culprit specified in the alert was the norovirus.

To … Read more

If you're into freeware antivirus and antimalware apps, chances are you're running either AVG Free, Avira Antivir, or Avast. Avast Home Edition guards your PC and the network with multiple shields that scan executables and files. You can select parameters for scanning, and even choose wildcards to exclude specific file types. You can adjust the sensitivity level for the program's detectors when it comes to scanning downloaded files, instant messages, e-mails, and a host of P2Ps. Its efficient interface opens up window after window to tweak its settings to your liking, for novice to advanced-level protection.

Though … Read more