Microsoft Windows.....sigh

I've just spent the best part of two days trying to rid my computer of the W32/Virut.n.gen virus....

the score so far is :-

Virus 1 Derek 0

In the sense that after numerous attempts to get rid of the rootkit from my PC and then all the damaged files I eventually threw in the towel and reinstalled Windoze XP Professional.... I have however found the chink in the armour of my PC that caused the infection to slip in undetected.... I burned a CD for my step daughter they were wma music files.... all of them were infected with the virus and only activated once they were played on Windows Media Player... which of course I did after burning the CD for her to check they were ok....Dohhhhhhhhhhhhhh !!!

I threw every single bit of hardcore Operating System knowledge and utility I possessed at this virus and it stuck to my Windoze like a bottle of red wine does when spilt on a white shirt... no sooner did I destroy it and my virus scanners confirm it, as sure as the sun rises in the morning at the next reboot it was back in there taking root.... I threw in the towel when it opened an IRC backdoor and let in several other trojans... in all I had over 2800 exe files infected.... an almost impossible task to repair.... it's a bit of a stupid virus in that it lets you know it's there by reducing your kick ass PC to a Sinclair Spectrum and of course everybody thinks it's normal when you browse the web that it makes Firefox eat up 400Mbytes of ram and run all four CPU's at full tilt.... perfectly normal ...... I would have thought the idea of a virus was to keep maximum stealth... not spray your entire filesystem executables with bird flu...... :(

granted at first it was a bit stealthy and it would probably have gone unnoticed by an average computer user..... but if my pc so much as stutters I'm on it like a hawk finding out why.... I knew it was infected within about 1 minute flat....my PC froze for about 20 seconds then my default partition just went into overdrive...... and at that point I wasn't that bothered..... easily got rid of so I thought.... wrong, by the time I had fired up my Antivirus update the damage was done..... :( no sooner was my Antivirus killing one infection than the virus was infected 10 other files.....

I could quite happily cleave the writer(s) of this particular nasty virus into two separate script kiddies.... in fact I would actively support the public flogging of all script kiddies .... they are pointless things to have in the food chain... a bit like wasps.....

I am seriously considering running Windows XP on a Xen virtual machine under Linux... I don't after all use anything in Windows that I can't use in Linux.... at the moment it's the other way around I run Linux in a virtual machine under Windows....

Still I'd pay good money to watch script kiddies thrashed to within an inch of their miserable lives :)


take my advice if you EVER get infected with this particular virus or one of it's variants..... format and reinstall Windows..... your wife will love you for it ;¬)