Quote - I felt the same yesterday. Until-I started my computer this afternoon to get into some Poser work and after 2 hours of trying to get rid of the mentioned virus I'm now looking at spending most of this weekend reformating and reinstalling 10 gig of Poser content and the rest of my programs and files.

See... this is exactly why it is on topic. So we can warn people that they do not need to reformat. My PC was more infected than a Civil War camp follower... ( ;) ), but she's clean as a whistle now. Also, it is somewhat needed just so Daz's name can be kept out of the mud on this. Like a lot of other people, i -found- I had the virus by trying to use Daz installers. But with research I also found that they were not the source. Rather, ,b>they were a symptom. My daz installers were getting infected as I downloaded them, by the virus alread on my machine. How did I get it? I don't know for sure and I doubt I ever will. I will say this: 1. My norton was up to date until I removed it two days ago. 2. My spybot was up to date. 3. My zone alarm was up to date. 4. My router has a firewall, but I had 'unchecked' 'block NAT redirections'. I don't know why I did that, but it's checked now. I don't think that was the infection source as I think that only applies to the network between my home computers... 5. Mid march I installed the latest version of RealPlayer. Stupid, stupid move on my part. But I had a video given to me and I couldn't get it to run in anything else... and I didn't want to hassle the creator for a new version in a different format. I figured 'ok, so Realplayer is a known trojan - but that was in the mid 90s, surely they've cleaned up their act by now. Stupid of me, yeah, but I gave them the foolish benefit of the doubt. Guess what? When I cleaned my computer of the 7 trojans and spyware bots it found, the first one it found was in realplayer... 6. Up until two days ago I could not figure out how to disable msnmsgs.ese - that MSN messenger thingy that kept showing up in my taskbar. I would disable it, turn it off, block it with zone alarm, and on reboot it would be right back there using my .NET to wander around... Guess what? Over 10 copies of the virus were found inside of it... In fact, it took so long to 'cure' it that at first I thought my computer was locked in a loop... Once it was cured, my steps for disabling it that had failed before suddenly worked... Go figure. 7. Consider how many freestuff items work through exes. Not many, but some. Any one of those is also a potential source. Likewise -ANY- exe you get online could come from an infected PC. Once you run that exe, you will be infected as well. Further, in IE a hacker could use ActiveX to download a small exe onto your machine and run it, infecting you... They could even do it as part of something you thought was a legitimate download... That is why it is so easy to spread... Sure people should be more cautious, but it only takes one person in your personal network to lower their guard. I have heard this virus turns your PC into a gnutella p2p server - a rumor I heard. Given that my router kept failing or recycling, my net had been unusually slow this past month, and every now and then my PC would just up and turn off for no apparent reason, I suspect there is some truth to that. It is possible that I infected everyone in my 'MSN chat' contact list... I haven't asked them - I don't even know some of them anymore because it has been that long since I used MSN chat, but my account there still exists... So... I had many possible routes through which I could have been infected. None of them the result of 'knowingly' using p2p. But, I am fairly sure I did -NOT- get infect -by- Daz. Rather, the virus infecting my Daz content let me make the leap and 'put two and two together' and realize my PC troubles were a virus. And I -ONLY- realized that by reading about it on these forums. If not for it being posted here, I would still have the virus on my PC today... Given that for over a month none of the major anti-virus companies added this virus to their detection files, even though they knew how to detect it, I consider them to have seriously dropped the ball. Possibly even to the level of a breach of contract class action. As a result of that, the virus had a month and a half to spread out to all sort of innocent people all over the net. And it knows how to disable your anti-virus detection files, so even if you update know, you might still not find the virus. You have to run your detection apps from a CD burned on a clean machine (and you have to have a reason to be sure that machine is as clean as you think it is). And all of this I only learned thanks to the warning here. This virus has spread out much farther into our community than any other previous warning. 98% of all viruses are quickly found and added into the detection software of most major anti-virus apps. As a result, most of these warning are only for the fools who do not stay current with their security and their anti-virus apps. This one was different. It was different because those major apps purposefully ignored it. So a lot of us who were acting properly in staying up to date were still infected. So it has hit many more people in the community than a normal situation would result in - even in a normal situation with a virus like this. I am now using 'avast' as my anti virus application, backed by regular downloads of drweb and bitdefeder's free detection scans.

Truth has no value without backing by unfounded belief.
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