I clicked on a link in someone's home page area and immediately got a popup from CA Antivirus saying that it deleted a ***js/snz.a *** virus from my browser cache files area.

I went to CA Antivirus' website and can't find any information on this virus. I did a google search and can't find any information about it either. I did find a discussion forum that has a few posts of others wondering what this threat is and how severe it is.  All of the posters seem to be using CA Antivirus.

It seems that the virus appears when in a browser and from what I can tell,  deleting temporary internet files and clearing the browser cache seems to purge it from the computer. But that's as much as I can figure out at this point.

Apparently SBC Yahoo anti-virus and Zone Alarm detects it too.

Oh crap. Here we go again.
Just updated AVG and nothing is popping up.
Keeping my fingers crossed.

It's starting to look like it might be a problem with the latest CA Antivirus definition updates.

http://www.dynamoo.com/blog/2007/12/jssnza-likely-false-positive-in-etrust.html

I tried to submit a virus report to CA but couldn't for the life of me find a place on their site to do that. But apparently someone has, so if it is a false positive CA will send out new updates to fix the problem.

I've got my fingers crossed that this is all it is.

I've heard that viruses are spread on behalf of anti-virus software programers to put the fear of God in us at losing all our hard drives.
Good for sales of anti-virus programs.
I'd love to meet them.

Yes ashley9803,  that is the truth...sometimes they do it but they are safe vuruses..... :-)

The last virus I had required me to re-install windowas and 150 Gig of programs and content.
Now if I had this guys balls.....

For our own good. Uh-hunh. And insurance agents would love to start a li'l fire here and there in your back yard to remind you how important good fire insurance is. I found my anti-virus solution: Linux.

M

Linux has holes. Its just not targeted as much as windows.

symantec said they deleted 6 million copies of the storm worm e-mail on xmas day/eve. whilst not affecting OS X, it infects computers going to some russian-operated websites, whether thru links from other sites, or by opening spam e-mails.

Quote - Linux has holes. Its just not targeted as much as windows.

Err, not even close... If you were running an Amiga or somesuch, where the number of users is ridiculously small and the OS capabilities ridiculously osbscure, sure - you may have a point. But when you're talking about Linux? It runs several hundreds of millions of websites, and roughly a hundred million individual users -  from The New York Stock Exchange, Google, and a huge chunk of the Fortune 500's server farms... down to Joe Sixpack's kid playing with Gentoo for the first time becuase his little geek buddies recommend it for Unreal Tournament.

Trust me - there simply ain't no obscurity there anymore, pal. :)

In spite of this, the last viable Linux virus/worm came out 7+ years ago, and it only hit a relative handful of targets who had neglected to put in a six-month-old patch. The last OSX virus/worm... was a lab experiment; there has never been one in-the-wild.

Meanwhile, Storm is still swallowing roughly a thousand Windows machines each minute.

--

Speaking of obscurity...

OSX is set to take 10% of the desktop market overall in ~3-6 months, if it hasn't already... and that's up from the roughly 3.75% (avg) that was counted at this time last year. If (a really big if) OSX continues to grow at that rate, Apple could easily knock Microsoft out of dominance within 5 years, and have time to spare in doing so. Linux has pretty much accomplished the same goal in the server market, where MSFT has to fight for every scrap it gets, and doesn't have that much market share.

This means that we'll see rather soon if what you're typing comes to pass. Personally and professionally, I can say with easy confidence that (barring something really, really dumb happening in Apple's coding department), OSX will not become the constant victim of malware like Windows is now, nor will Linux.

/P

MS hasn't done themselves any favors with Vista.  But I wouldn't be too hasty to start writing MS's obituary just yet.........while it's true that they have lost some market share in the desktop PC OS game recently -- it's also true they are a L-O-N-G ways from going belly-up.  Overcoming even 90% market share isn't exactly an easy mountain for competing OS's to climb.  Even if those alternative OS's positively sparkle with quality.

Linux'es problem is that it's an OS for geeks and IT types.  It's not simple enough for most people to use -- and thereby to dislodge Windows from the general market.  On servers and in CPU rooms -- sure: but not on the desktops of the average user.

For OSX, you'll have to start by convincing everyone to begin buying Macs.  And while it's true that Apple has been doing well business-wise lately: that success is largely thanks to the iPod, iPhone, and now the iTouch.  Their PC's are selling, too -- but nowhere near (not even close) the numbers for PC's -- even PC's encumbered with Vista.  They could concievably begin to erode MS's near-total dominance of the overall desktop market: but taking it over?  While possible (anything's possible): it's the longest of long shots.

If (if) MS hits a homerun with Windows 7, then that'll be all she wrote.  But I wouldn't dare to predict with certitude what will happen.  Because I don't know.  Neither does anyone else.

[Edit] -- if Windows 7 turns out to be another Vista, then all bets are off.

Obit? No... they won't die any easier than DEC, Tandem, Amdhal, or Unisys did.

Their marketshare OTOH is down to roughly 85% in the desktops, and still dropping. Linux does eat up about 3% of the desktop market all by itself overall.

As for their PC sales? Meh - one year later, and Vista is at barely 14% of the market. Contrast that to XP having almost double that number (36.something%, IIRC) 12 months after its release in 2001. Vista's sales rates continue to slow down, and not increase (ref: here ), while Leopard's is growing almost exponentially... in spite of most new OSX users (usually) having to purchase a Mac to get Leopard.

Quote - If (if) MS hits a homerun with Windows 7, then that'll be all she wrote.

That's a really big "if", unless they go back to basics - tearing out all the cruft and bloat along the way. It's also (at least) two to three years off. Anything sooner and it'll be worse than Vista, judging by their own stated current phases of development for it.

Quote - {Linux is not} not simple enough for most people to use -- and thereby to dislodge Windows from the general market.

I wouldn't be so fast about saying that anymore ... :)

/P

None of the companies that you've listed had the hold on the overall market in the way that MS does.  While it's true that you tend to see Macs in the 3D/graphics world -- in the corporate world at large (engineering / banking / industry / etc., etc., etc.), Macs are virtually unknown.

We agree on several points: Vista has been a bust; MS has hurt themselves (badly) with Vista; MS has lost a few percentage points of desktop market share recently (keep in mind that the overall desktop market has been declining); and Apple makes top-notch machines / OS'es.

But overcoming MS's 85% (?) won't happen overnight.  There are simply too many corporations & general users who don't even know what an "Apple" is.  Not to mention having to invest in all new software, and the cost of re-training all of your people to use it.  I don't think so........at least not in the short term.

We don't agree that Linux shows any signs whatsoever of displacing desktop Windows.  At least not right now.  Apple, on the other hand, has enjoyed some recent positive news......which has been a long time in coming for them.  Heh -- it would certainly hit a high point for irony if a company which Bill Gates invested in (through the purchase of non-voting stock)  to keep that struggling company afloat back when it looked like it was dying on the vine a few years ago.....if that little sickly kitten of a company grows up into a tiger & eats him (snort).  Ah, well -- at least he's invested in Apple stock.  So he's hedged his bets.  :biggrin:

Heh -- I'll grant you this much: if Windows 7 = Vista II: then I'll start seriously looking at alternatives.

I don't see Macs taking over the corporate realm... but I do see Linux doing it. Already, most of the developers here are either doing their work directly on Linux @ the cube, or use Linux directly during lab-work. Nearly all of us have two desktops @ the cube: Windows (for corp email/calendar/etc), and Linux (to get all the work done). About half the graphics guys just use Macs. Me, I use Fedora Core 7 as my primary desktop, with my crappy little XP-based IBM ThinkPad T-41 getting accessed via an rdesktop session for email and such, thanks to the lingering corp fetish with Exchange. I figure that if/when Evolution (or something like it) can take over all of Exchange's functions, then that'll pretty much be it for Windows here. It's pretty much the only reason we still have the thing, aside from a couple of niche tools and such. Otherwise we collaborate through Wikis, All of our DB's (save for one here) are MySQL, our products all come out now with Linux-based tools, embedded systems, and SDK's, and there is official Linux support all the way up and down the chain. Even the handful of Windows servers we still have locally all have Microsoft Services For UNIX installed, so that we can at least get some NFS out of them to access the legacy stuff they still carry. ...and my employer is #50-something in the Fortune 500 list. /P

Well, it turns out it was a problem with CA's updates. They've since sent out a fix and all is well :)

in the corporate world at large (engineering / banking / industry / etc., etc., etc.), Macs are virtually unknown

There's another, slightly more subtle issue as well: Apple is disproportionally overrepresented in the media.  What I mean is that, if you watch a lot of TV and movies, you see a lot more Apple computers (mostly laptops) than you would in the real world, which gives the impression Apple is more prevelant than they really are.

The reason is product placement.  Since Apple is the only company that makes Apple computers, which are easily distinguishable, they can afford to pay to have their product seen in film and TV.  The PC market is more fractured in terms of manufacturers and they don't have a unified appearence, so you don't have a single PC maker who appears everywhere.  Where they do appear, you get an Apple-like effect: watch one of the Stargate shows and you'd think the entire world runs on Dell laptops, for instance.

Well, let's face it. Windows XP came out after Windows 98(reason for XP's success). I never used Windows 2000, but there are quite a few people still running it. The reason Vista is bombing is because XP is-was that good. Yes it gets viruses and trojans, but XP along with other Windows platforms are the most popular running systems and if Yahoo and Google along with a few others would police their email services and search engines better maybe most of us wouldn't get infected near as often, but it's pretty bad when you do a search for virus information and half the results try to infect your system with something else. I say if countries won't police their internet traffic and arrest those for sabotage then do like China and just cut 'em off. I love all that SPAM asking me for my personal information coming from Russia, Korea, Canada, Mexico, South America, UK and Europoe the list goes on the worst offenders not in order per say. I'm not saying Americans are innocent either. Over all they just need to punish offenders and you never hear that they do.  

You are correct, in that the biggest obstacle to Vista is XP itself. There is simply no compelling reason to abandon it for Vista, and benchmarks have shown that XP will pretty much run anything 150-200% faster than the same app on Vista.

So far, Vista adoption is slow... slower than XP's, which in turn came out a year after Win2k did. You are right in that there was a lot of uptake from Win98 and (blecch) WinME.

By the by, the vast majority of spam email doesn't come from Yahoo or Google... they come straight out of compromised home user boxes.

/P

Yea, I agree a lot of spam does come from compromised users, but you would think they could monitor the out flow and tag boxes that were sending too much or set up special accounts for those people that were going to send lots of emails and try to dry up the abuse of free email accounts. The rest of it comes from smaller servers with admins that don't know how to stop it or can't afford to watch it or don't really care.

It's simple though really, security costs money and time. You can make your profit margins look better by simply not doing anything in some areas. Let the public eat the expense. Never mind worrying about being the means. 

As far as search engines, I'd say they need to change the system. Anyone can attach key words to their web pages to get hits from search engines as far I know; so what is to stop crooks from using it to spread trojans and viruses? Nothing but maybe getting caught and punished. How do you grab the bad guys when the country they come from doesn't care or doesn't have the resorces to enforce the rules? Another subject I could ramble on about. New laws when the ones made already can't be enforced because of the cost.

They're going to have to do something though because the internet is getting so diseased it's hard to use it without getting infected and the patches are making solid programs run less stable. Look at XP and all the security updates. In some cases the patches need patches.