Hi All For the second time I've been caught with my pants down, no I'm not having an affair :) right now I wish I was, anything but getting a virus, I've just had to reinstall XP twice to get rid of a really nasty virus, Mcafee missed it but the free pandasoft checker caught it, I can't remember who posted the message about them but thanks anyway, I'm now completely paranoid and I've just lost a whole cd's worth of freebies mostly exe's and all infected and totally useless now, so please be careful out there and learn from my mistake, update your virus checker weekly if possible

Attached Link: http://www.sams3d.com/Freebies1.htm

I update everyday and run a sweep every night just before I log off for the evening....don't feel bad about being paranoid, we put alot of work into our computers and work and to loose it because someone wants to play games is a real shame, real shame. Wish they would take that energy and put it towards something positive that would help others, not hinder them. But I am with you, keep updating to stay clean. Sharen :-) PS: if you have any of our models and need them again, you can still find all of them available at our site, if you lost anything that you might have bought from us, let us know and we will send you a second copy.

You may want to try Norton/Symantic anti-virus next time you upgrade. I have used it for years and never had a problem. I run the live update about twice a week and works great. Then again maybe I just have been lucky.

Wow, that's really scary. I've been online for 5+ years now, and have downloaded many gigs worth of stuff in that time, and I've been lucky enough to avoid any really nasty experiences with virii. (knock on wood) I use the normal virus scanning methods and some common sense, but that's about it. Any idea where you might have gotten it?

"Wish they would take that energy and put it towards something positive that would help others." The man who cannot create, will choose to destroy.

thanks a lot Sharen, I made sure I backed up everything I bought recently, I'm going to get Norton and run it with Mcafee see if together they can stop it happening again. bigSharenhug

Very good advice people! I recently had to change my e-mail address here on R'osity due to a constant barrage of the same virus being sent to my Inbox. Thankfully Norton caught it every time, but it was becoming a real pain. Update often and never open e-mail attachments from people you don't know. Better still, buy something reliable, like Norton Antivirus, which automatically scans all of your incoming and outgoing mail. A small price to pay for peace of mind. Dave :-)

I should mention that the virus was being sent from a company here in the UK, totally unrelated to 3D and graphics. I purchased from them months ago, but my Inbox was flooded with the same virus from them day after day. I contacted them but have yet to receive a reply. I guess it was using the e-mail addys in their Address Book to spread. Dave

Yep, exactly Dave, Norton is the best and lets it scan the mail before you even have a chance to get it....and I also was getting the same virus sometimes like 3 times per day for about a week, very annoying....and Hiram that may be true, but it is still a shame. Sharen and c1rcle ----- :-) we are here for you.

I'm not sure where it came from but it must have been with me for a while, it infected every exe file on every drive, I'm all clear now tho

just wanted to share something... i purchased a program called GOBACK 3 Deluxe by Roxio. it has been a life saver for me. i use it along with several anti-virus and trojan software. but, GOBACK really amazes me. say i opened a email with a infected attachment. i bring up the program and choose to revert my hard drive to an earlier time when everything was working. it handles system crashes, virus damage, lost data and more! whats is even better is it becomes part of your windows boot up. so if you were unable to boot to desktop because of a virus, you just hit the spacebar and it brings GOBACK menu to revert and other advanced options. when our satellite services for internet connections was installed on my computer, the guy who ran the set up typed in the network passwords and chose to "remember password" so i never remembered it. my computer crashed and i deleted some temp files and there went my computer. so i tried to revert the computer back to the day before when i could log onto windows and just push "ok" on the password login screen...and it WORKED! you can choose to even go back just 5 minutes earlier. it totally undo's whatever the problem was. if you download something from freestuff and you use one of the go back options...you will lose all those downloaded files and have to re-download. again, my opinion of this program. one more thing...get mcafee uninstaller. it monitors any and everything installed on your computer. even those tacky scripts people try to use to harm your computer.

I've never been able to understand people who spend their time writing computer viruses - they must be able to program, which should involve a level of intelligence, but instead they choose to squander that talent trying to make other people's lives a misery. It's really pathetic. Another good tip people! - Back up all your important stuff to CDR! There's nothing worse than losing everything AND having to re-install your operating system from scratch! Arghhhhh! grits teeth! Dave :-)

there's something else here that's missing in too many places, community spirit, it's really nice to see that it's just a shame it only happens in the virtual world and not the real world, it's like the other day, my nextdoor neighbour was ill and I took her to the local hospital, thankfully she's ok now, but everyone keeps saying "well done" or "how nice of you" but all I was doing was the right thing, I'm not trying to make myself out to be a hero or anything but not enough people just help someone without expecting a reward of some kind. I'm old fashioned in a lot of my ways but that's just who I am.

Cinnamon I've just seen your message, it's possible I could have saved myself several hours of mucking about XP has something like goback built in, I forgot all about it. I'm now turning the air blue in my room and the cat's just hidden under the bed again, my wife thinks I've gone totally barmy now :/

Okay C1rcle, go apologise to your cat! ;-) I still think you did the right thing though. From the sound of things your computer was in a really bad way - fit for an episode of ER! Glad you're in the all clear now. :-) Thanks cinnamon for the info on GOBACK! Sounds great! Dave :-)

both cat's have forgiven me, the dog wants to lick me to death and my wife, well let's not go there, I'm not in the mood right now, I', going to have a look at goback as well, thanks cinnamon

LOL!!! Dave :-)

FYI: Norton and McAfee don't work well together. They try to cancel eachother out during install. Plus, it's added resources that could be better used elsewhere. I have run Norton for years as well, with no problems. I just got one in the mail yesterday, from somebody on R'osity who had me in there address book. But Norton caught it. I would strongly advise not running both Norton and McAfee @ the same time. I have seen what it can do. ~EA

MacAfee failed me, Norton saved me. I thought I was done for the last time this happened-- all three puters caught it, two almost terminally, one was at bluescreen. Norton got rid of it and it updates when you tell it to, and I tell it to every single night. This last plague, couple of days ago, I got lucky, there were too many e-mail alerts, things were slowing down suspiciously, anyway, I did a live update-- there were more virus definitions. Rescanned,and I'm still-- knock wood-- uninfected. I'm a Norton fan for life. I have ME and XP and they both have Go Back features, some of these worms and viruses attack those files first! That's what killed me last time, I could not revert to a previous state. I don't think this is all that off-topic, posers do lots of download. I was looking at begging Rocity and DAZ for tons, no days, no, weeks! of redownloads if I was infected. Emily

i have a go back feature in ME also, although it is not GO BACK by Roxio. i'm curious...did you actually use GO BACK or the feature inside ME (system restore)? because i tried using system restore and it was attacked by a virus. but system restore was not a part of my boot up. GO BACK is. in fact, i think it is one of the first things that load. system restore failed many times. i havent had any problems with GO BACK. but...if it is what you used, i want to make extra extra extra extra cautions. i use norton also. anti-virus and norton internet security. i have black ice and have not installed it.

I tried System Restore-- I don't have Go Back, but I will look into it-- when you're facing many many gigs of data loss, it's a cold hard feeling I do not want to feel again if I can help it. I think this was the Nimda parasite and it hit the sys restore files FIRST! Vicious. I cleaned the whole mess up, installed MacAfee and got hit again a day later, again the sys restore were the very first files wiped. Half a day later, MacAfee gets a fix on the new Nimda, too late. Now, I use Norton pretty religiously -- nothing else killed the bugs first and keeps killing them with the quickest updates. I got the bad virii from EBay last fall, many of the overseas sellers were hit. So these were people I expected and welcomed attachments from. I also now have Zone Alarm firewall as a backup, it can shut everything down in an instant. Changes the tags on suspect attachments from .exe to something benign and unuseable. Emily

FSecure is also a very good program. I was hit by CIH last fall and it's the only virus program that saved my computer. I had quite a few infected files and it hit and ruined Norton before I found out I had it. To this day Norton will not work for me and it came installed from the factory so I had no way to reinstall it.

A little late maybe, but Id just like to pass on a simple method for preventing viruses/vira from spreading through address books in e-mail clients such as Outlook Express. In your address book, create a new contact. Call it "000" with e-mail address "000". It will automatically go on top of your lists of contacts, and if your e-mail program ever attempts to send out batch e-mails to everyone on your contact list, you will get an error message about an invalid recipient. That way you will know that something suspicious is going on :) If everybody did this, we would never have problems with repeated virus infected mesages from the same sender, as mentioned above. It could only happen once, then the sender would be aware.

Dmon, that sounds like a good idea - nice early warning system. :-)

I've recently removed all of the entries in my Address Book and just choose to reply to a previous message to send e-mail. (Probably being a bit paranoid, but it saves me from worrying).

I'm glad that Norton is so thorough though at catching these darn things before they do any serious damage - it's caught a whole bunch of viruses since it was purchased. One of the down sides of being on the 'net and having a web site is that your contact address is posted for all to see, so if someone wants to spam you or send you a virus it's very easy. I considered Hotmail, but I heard a rumour that they let a couple of viruses through recently, and you only need to get infected just once and BANG goes all your work.

Now, can anyone think of a really inventive way to punish virus programmers?...I still think good old "tar and feathering" would do the trick, or maybe we could take them 'round to the vet and have them "fixed". ;-)

Dave :-)

Good point Ron! After I re-installed Windows recently it took ages to download all the updates and get it's immunisation back up to date. - Old viruses can be a threat too. Dave