Hi! I download lots of freebies and somehow I picked up a really nasty virus that eats the Poser.exe and also Photoshop. I wish I knew where I got it. It is horrible. It tells you every program is a virus and disables Poser. Now I have to reformat my hard drive and reinstall everything. Has anyone else had this virus? What is wrong with people that do such such nasty stuff????

It might be the polip.a virus that has infected quite a few computers recently (mine included).

If you haven`t reformatted your harddisk yet, then try downloading and running the drweb cureit program from the link.

http://download.drweb.com/drweb+cureit/

Some more information can be read at the link.

http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2645326

It is the polip virus! I remember my PC virus scanner saying that!!! Thanks.

The drweb cureit program should get rid of the virus without you having to reformat your harddisk.

What a mess! My main PC has over a 100 polops and is still scanning. I am very careful about updating my virus scanner (AVG Grisoft) This virus has infected every Daz file. Who and why would someone do this to a complete stranger?

I dont understand the pleasure that they get from doing this either, they dont even get to see the mess that they make, it is pointless vandalism.

It may be pointless (when I was 15 years old, I though pointless vandalism was the greatest thing EVER) or it may have a point. Viruses can do more than just trash your files. They can scan your system looking for e-maill addresses (spam targets) or credit card info (fraud targets) and send these back to "home base."

Of course, the conspiracy theorists would say they are written by the anti-virus companies to drive sales.
:sneaky:

It isnt pointless, but its point is evil.

The kind of  "person" that does this is what is referred to as a "zombie-master". These are usually pimply-faced children with no social skills that cant code their way out of a wet paper bag aside from altering copywrites and statements of authorship in programs with hex editors.

The purpose of polipos is to lower your systems antivirus settings so that a Trojan can more easily take root on your system. A trojan is a malicious code that after infecting your system, opens a port in your firewall if any, and then "phones home" to either the person that wrote it or whoever else its configured to communicate with. It informs whoever that your system is now ready for them to log into at thier convienece with a custom password.

Once this has happened the kid may as well be standing next to you when you type. Everything you type can be seen in real time, your logs accessed, your passwords seen, and your drives searched for any personal info like credit card nums (read: identiy theft and worse). They can even format your disc remotely, turning your system into a paper weight that needs its OS reinstalled to be a working system again.

Basically, most zombie masters get trojan control of "Fleets" of computers, as many hundreds as they can, and use thier collective bandwidth to blast other sites off the web in what is called DOS or DDOS attacks (Denial of Service, Distributed Denial of Service).

Usually this activity tapers off when the young idiots in question finally find someone out there to condescend to have sex with them, but in the meantime they are pretty damn inconvienient.

Keep your anti virus and firewalls up to date. Discomboberate WinXP systems. Check out www.grc.com for awesome free security utilities and laymen's descriptions and solutions for many online security issues.

Good Luck,

Logan

I'm curious though.. I had my Poser.exe and PSP.exe infected by Polipos but for all that I could see it never actually did any harm to the programs. My Poser ran just fine in its infested state. All that happened was my firewall came up and said the program had changed and then finally my virus scanner got the clue (DAYS, if not WEEKS after I was originally infected with this crap) and told me I'd got a virus.

To this date I still don't know HOW I got it. I don't use P2P networks (other than Skype and MSN and both are usually set to away/offline) and I'm normally very careful what I click...

sigh

At least Dr.Web's CureIt cured 99% of the infected files :m_grin:

Well, I started the virus scanning on both my infected computers and it is telling me EVERY single .exe file is infected. I wonder if this virus is a scam, and just makes everything look like a virus so you have to delete everything? So far, I have 661 polipos on my main computer and the scanner isn't done. It is checking my slave drives where I store my poser stuff and telling me all my Daz stuff is infected. What a mess!

It's not a scam. My firewall went berserk beccause all the .exe's had changed size and now suddenly tried to access the network.. The virus targets .exe's so it's no wonder your entire  exe population was hit. I think I got hold of mine before EVERYTHING was infected, but it was a LOT. And including that a lot of DAZ's .exe's.

And you don't have to delete anything. CureIt will.. cure it. in 99% oof the cases at least. I loist some of the files in my SystemRestore, and curiously enough both PWizard and MorphManager. But I just re-downloaded those so it was no biggie. And then all I can do is hope I won't need the System Restore... :)

My big mistake was running Grisoft's AVG scanner first which moves viruses into a virus vault. Even if you restore the files in the vault they no longer work. I should have run cureit first. Now I have a HUGE mess. My laptop and older desktop were also hooked up to my home network but turned OFF and I had not even used them for awhile. This virus somehow spread to my turned-off computers and infected them!!!! I use my older PCs to store all my Poser purchases and if I have to redownload everything I will go nuts! Daz only alows 3 download resets a month and I have hundreds, and over 1000 at RR. Thank God RR is zip files so they should be ok. Lightening struck near my house a couple months ago and took out all my PC network cards and the motherboard in my main computer. It also fried my speakers. I think God is trying to tell me something, like take up golf, LOL! Really, am am very depressed. "Sobs and cries".

That is why you should backup your files as often as possible.  Though I lost approximately 6 gigabytes of data because of that damn polip.a.

No need to reset everything individually.
Ask the support people for a reset of everything, or purchase an account burn.

I ran Cureit (I have Norton 2005 AV + firewall as well).  Cureit detected a trojan in realplayer folder - my son had d/l a movie file so I told him off!).  Dealt with the file using Cureit, ran scan with Norton and as far as it's concerned all is clean (fingers XXXXd)

noel, how does one acquire the polipos virus? is it via MSN instant messages, via yahoo instant messages, via bit-torrent, via some othe P2P service, via the multimedia group or other usenet groups, via yahoo file groups, etc.?

I think I got it from Daz or from a freebie. I have no idea how I got it. The problem is my other PCs were what I backed up my files on - and those PCs got infected somehow even though they were turned off. What does Daz charge to burn all your purchases??

The virus doesnt appear instantly so when you see it in a file it doesnt mean that the file was the first to be affected (even when it first appears on your computer).

Daz have said that there is no virus on their computer/server.

The virus is probably not from a poser freebie, it affects exe files and .scr files.

Quote - My big mistake was running Grisoft's AVG scanner first which moves viruses into a virus vault. Even if you restore the files in the vault they no longer work. I should have run cureit first. Now I have a HUGE mess.

Heh tell me about it.

I'm using Avast as my virus scanner, and when it told me I had this Polipos it suggested a boot time scan. Well I agreed of coure, to clean out the files locked in memory...

but...

Little did I know that Avast's default Virus Chest size is too small - can't remember the size but once I'd moved some 5-6 .exes there it reported "out of disk space" and asked if I wanted to ignore, move or delete the infected files.

Now I know I should have selected "ignore" and dealt with it with CureIt.. but idiot as I was, I selected Move...

So all sorts of .exe files, including a lot of more or less vital windows files (calculator, charmap, paint and so on) was ust  lumped together in a folder with NO record of where they came from (Avast's usual Virus Chest works like the Recycling Bin in that it keeps a record of the original location which enables you to restore the file)

So there I was with a lot of files (including my Poser.exe and PSP.exe) in a place where they shouldn't be.

So I had to find the old shortcuts in the menu, see where they pointed to, and move the 'exe there after CureIr had cleaned it.

It took the best part of a day

I have just the punisment for those guys who makes virii... (assuming it's boys as it is in99% of the cases...)

Hoist the bugger up in some tall structure (crane/scaffold, gallow), with a fishing wire around his privates.. then lower im down.. in small jerks....

that'll teach him....

I got hit too, not sure exactly how. Had a Bit Torrent program on my computer which I downloaded only one LEGAL movie with ages ago -- was a Star Wars fan film from The Force.Net -- but never used it after so I'm not sure what else it might have been doing when I wasn't looking.  The virus came out early in March but I didn't have any trouble until April. I remember going to a LEGAL site for some PSP stuff but Netscape didn't like the code or layout or whatever so I had to use Internet Explorer, which I hate for several reasons, not least of which is it's a bloody virus magnet. Something downloaded too fast to see what the heck it was and a DOS window opened & closed equally as fast. That was on the 11th or 12th.  Next morning I turned on the computer & noticed a display problem. Thought my monitor was dying, since it's under warranty, I called Dell. They told me to relax & update my drivers, which I did. But that made no difference, in fact I believe it made the problem worse because as I found out on the 26th, the drivers were loaded with Polipos. Along with everything else in .exe format I'd downloaded in the last 2 weeks, including all the stuff that had been sitting in my Daz folder till I got around to burning it onto DVDs. Lost all my March Madness purchases & had to download all over again when I was finally bug free.

Not to mention the virus had eaten Poser 6, CorelDraw, Word Perfect and MS Works Suite. Along with my scanner software & my boot screen for dessert. Still trying to get Windoze to quit bitching at me about that. :-(

Oh, and yes I had antivirus software running. AVG Free, which is normally pretty good. But this particular piece of crud it missed, kept telling me "no viruses found". Too bloody late! Now I have Bit Defender 8. Norton also finds & kills this. But CureIt from Dr. Web is what you need to use first, that cleans nearly all the infected .exes and quarantines what can't be fixed. Btw, all anti-virus programs will quarantine infected files. Once there, they can't do any harm unless you restore them. To get rid of them completely, you have to delete them. And turn off System Restore if you have WinXP because viruses hide there and can't be removed while it's on.

I got the Win32.Polip virus and have worked for a week trying to get rid of it
I ran BitDefender on all my files and it said it fixed the files (it changed the Icon to a dos Icon), only Norton and AVG still found the virus in the files that BitDefender said it fixed.
I ran Dr. Web and it said all the files were clean, but the exe were dead! And I didn't want to delete them.
I got a bright idea (very seldom do I get those) and changed the extension from exe to zip on several of these files.
I ran Dr. Web again and it found the virus and cured it
I changed the extension back to exe and the icon changed back to original.
I ran Norton and Avg on these files and NO VIRUS WAS DETECTED.
I installed the programs with no hitch. Check my system for Virus's and everything was Clear.
This Worked for me I hope it works for you, so you don't have to get the files again.
Steve

Heh, wish that bright idea had occurred to me before I tossed about a dozen "uncleanable" files. Will keep it in mind should I be so unfortunate as to get hit again.

Just a note for what I did on clearing the Win32.polip I changed the extension with Norton running then diabled it when I ran Dr. Web. Dr Web said the files were ok until I disabled Norton, then Dtr. Web found the virus in the new extension and cured it. I changed the extension back and then enabled Norton again.

My antivirus found some infectected daz .exe files the other day but couldn't clean them at that time. I used that cureit and it didn't find any other files, other than adware ones which my Adware and Spybot missed, but no virus or trojans.

I decided to try cleaning the infected files with my virus scanner just now and found that my antivirus software (eTrust Antivirus) can now clean and restore the files.