Heya all, Just informing you that there is a new Virus out as of May 1, 2002 that even Norton's has no acknowledgement of. Yesterday at around 11pm est I was seen logged into rosity 100 times. Then not even 2 hours later that had tripled causing my to be on the site with well over 290 connections. Audre notified me as did Sipapu. I also hear this is happening to others at least in a once a month timeframe. So I am setting forth a how to go about fixing this. Since Nortons doesn't seem to have this virus definition. you best bet would be to go to this url http://www.antivirus.com it is from the makers of PC-Cillin they have this virus definition. There they have an online virus scanner. It's called House Call. Run that virus scanner on your drives (usually the main C: drive would be ok as most virus files adhere themselves to that drive) If you come up with JS_NOCLOSE.E then very simply delete the infected file. Then reboot. If you have a different one, look it up on their definition list before rebooting. Some may write coding to IEXPLORER.EXE or explorer.exe which both are needed for windows to properly run the GUI interface. Rebooting in that essence would save the newly written coding. Some may also rewrite some registry files which could make Windows inoperable unless in safe mode and regedit is hell to go through if you haven't done it before. On their Virus Definitions you will see ways to fix the damage payload that a malicious or harmful virus would cause.

thank you so very much for taking the time to post this!! once identified and a cure found... the bugger can't really do much damage hey?

It sounds like a D.O.S. attack. It can shut down the "rosity" servers if enough slave machines pick it up.

It can shut down the "rosity" servers well, not really... it can become a royal pain for a bit... but we have ways to stop the hijacking... though the client machine is still pumping communications packets out like crazy. it's more of a irritant than a 'destructor' from our point of view. but definitely not a good thing to have on your machine either way!

yes technically thats what my machine started to do ... without my knowledge .. I wasn't even at the PC and it kept loading more connections upon connections upon connections ... I just thank god that it wasn't a malicious payload viris as well.

I also got a IM I was logged in 250 times. It happened just after I set my Internet Explorer security to high. When I returned security to medium, logged out and in again it was ok. I just did this housecall scan you mentioned and it did not find any virus at all. I also have uptodate Norton antivirus. So could it be something else? Cookies or something? I am so dumb with these things. :-))

it could be many things .. from access noise in you isp line to a virus ... what I just put there was a way to fight off the viral aspect.

If you use the Opera browser , you won't get that problem, since it won't allow activeX controls. Just mentioning, of course,since I have NO bias whatsoever, nosirree ;-) ~S