just in case anyone might be curious about edriver's allegation toward Renderosity and Renderotica, this is his response to an e-mail that i sent to him inquiring as to exactly what was going on here........his response reads as follows: What it does is create a notepad document that contains vital information about your internet account including your username and password and sends to someone or some ftp site where its creator can retrieve the information and gain free internet access by logging in as you. As far as I can tell, going to the chatroom is how I got the virus. I've also gotten it just by visiting the site and browsing through the free stuff and galleries. The renderotica staff's attitude of "no big deal" has forced me to protect myself and my equipment by staying away from them entirely and this means not receiving ebot emails telling me when someone responds to a message or comments on a gallery pic. Renderotica has attracted a lurker with malice intent and I don't want to fall victim to his game. I only discovered the trojan because I use dialup access that doesn't connect automatically and his trojan creation is assuming the opposite. I like renderotica and the people I communicate/share with there but the staff is not doing anything about this problem and alot of people are going to get screwed by their lack of interest and failure to rectify this situation. I've warned as many people as I could and sleep with a clear conscience and since cutting off my ties to renderotica and renderosity the code that has been coming up in my registry daily no longer appears.

What I do all day long is talk to peope who have, one way or another, contracted a virus, worm or password stealing trojan. I am going to look into this first thing Monday morning. edriver's error is to call it quits with the forums as an altrnative to installing a firewall and antivirus software. He will just run into the same problems eleswhere, surfing b*tt-cheeks to the wind like that. The first line of defense against this is run a Mac. There's 40 viruses compared to 47,000 on the PC (1/10%). 80% of what I see on the PC is Kakworm and PWSteal; so if you avoid (or patch) Outlook Express and AOL you eliminate most of the threat.

I know I'm repeating myself,but, I'm always in and out of here. I checked my system and found nothing. How come I'm so lucky, and he's not?

Alternately run NT... same here.. no virii found on my system... I've since gotten Optout and Zone Alarm... interesting about the aureate thing...

Im here over one year. I use Zone alarm and Norton Utilities 2000 (Norton Anti-Virus 2000 is integrated there). Antivirus scans my system at the highest heuristic mode every night and needs a hour to get trough all disks at my local LAN. I have a cable connection and my Server runs 24h a day and I have a cable connection, so Im 365 days a year at the internet... Norton never found a virus in my system... But sure Zonealarm will be about 30-50 times a day bring a message that somebody trys to get in my system.... So I think a firewall is a must before connecting to the net... So, the price of freedom is stay alert :-) Andreas

Thanks, Ikyoto, for the report. I am just sorry that you had to go through all that time and effort. Had proper protection been in place on the alleged victim's machine to begin with, his system would not have been hit by that particular worm AND by using a good firewall he most likely would have had a log file of any attempt to do so. Instead, all he can say is that, "As far as I can tell..." he got it somewhere here. And the mounting, overwhelming evidence is that he did not. Take care and thanks again.

Another thing I do is I've placed a line coupler from radio shack (one of those phone cord extension female to female sockets) on my phone line. I have a T1 connection via phone line and its on all the time. When I don't need the internet I simply decouple the line. I only couple when I want to access something. I think people who just leave their line on all the time even if they don't need access are raising the chance of getting nailed by a huge factor. If you're not connected, you can't get hacked. Just plugin when you want access and decouple otherwise and DON'T leave your machine connected and on over night.

Another thing I do is I've placed a line coupler from radio shack (one of those phone cord extension female to female sockets) on my phone line. I have a T1 connection via phone line and its on all the time. When I don't need the internet I simply decouple the line. I only couple when I want to access something. I think people who just leave their line on all the time even if they don't need access are raising the chance of getting nailed by a huge factor. If you're not connected, you can't get hacked. Just plugin when you want access and decouple otherwise and DON'T leave your machine connected and on over night.