How to Protect Your Computer & a Virus Story !

[stewert]

Hey guys let me tell you some shit about computer protection and a story about a trojan virus I had a while back. A lot of you may know this crap but some may not so it might help some people.

If you can get a good anti-virus program, I believe Nortons is still the best and not too expensive. There are some free ones if you look around on the net but some of them cause problems with certain computers. I would get Nortons or a well known brand name.

My old computer did not have an anti-virus program on it. I ended up getting 4 trojan viruses from an auto-download at some website using the old IE 5.0 browser. I can not remember what the website was but I know what time the viruses were installed. It was at 9:20pm on a monday night. It showed the time and date in the windows registery. The guy that fixed it asked me if the problems started at 9:20pm on monday, I said yes. So he removed all the installed files from that time and date.

There was a problem though, every time we re-booted the computer those pesky trojans re-installed themselves. So he had to go through almost every folder on my hard drive and look for files installed at 9:20pm at such and such date.

He found them all but it took a while, these virus writing idiots hide this crap in sneaky places in your computer. One file was named crapola, and another was named lsd. After about 3 hours he finally found them all and got rid of them. He had to go into the windows registry and delete them, then start the computer in safe mode and find the hidden trojan files in my computer folders. I can not remember how many of them were hidden, maybe 3 or 4. They were hidden and programmed to install every time the computer was booted up. So if you just deleted them from the registry it did no good.

All this happened because I was still using IE 5.0 and the security on it was not up to date and it let a script auto-install on my computer without me even knowing it.

Here is a neat little website that will scan your computer for viruses for free. This really helped me a lot when I had my trojan viruses. I was still able to get online so we used this site to tell us what viruses my computer had. Then we just looked for them in the registery etc. It made the job of finding them a lot easier.

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Here is what you should do to protect your computer, besides using a good anti virus program and maybe a firewall.

I would go download mozilla firefox 0.9 and use it, I think it is better than Netscape and IE. I have used them both for about 5 years and I think Firefox is better than both of them. I mostly used Netscape, but I also used IE quite a bit. Firefox 0.9 works perfect and I have not had one problem with it. It's sort of like Netscape and IE but better than both. And it's only 4.7mb.

http://www.mozilla.org/download.html

If you plan to use IE for your browser do this.

Upgrade to IE 6.0 if you have not done so, you can order the cd-rom for free if you do not want to spend the time downloading it. Just go to the microsoft.com website and order it.

Once you do that go here using IE 6.0 and check for updates, let the page load then click scan for updates. It will scan your computer and tell you what updates you need. Then you can download and install the updates. My old computer needed 19 updates dating all the way back to 1998, lol. I had never updated the piece of shit in 6 years.

http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp

You can also get the security upgrades on a cd-rom, but it is only current to february of this year. So I would check the microsoft windows update website above to see if they have any new updates.

Here is the microsoft protect your PC page.

http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/default.asp

They also recommend a firewall.

Here is a browser security setting page for IE and Mozilla.

http://cybercoyote.org/security/settings.htm

It tells you how to set up your security settings. On that page they say this: Mozilla is cleaner and quite a bit faster than Internet Explorer. Tabbed browsing (window-in-window), excellent security, and superb popup blocking are it's other major advantages. Mozilla also remembers passwords for you.

That password manager is pretty neat, and the pop up blocker works perfect.

There you have it, once you do all that crap your computer should be protected. In the 6 years I had my old computer I only got a virus one time, and I did not have an anti virus program or a firewall. I would at least get the anti virus program, but if you want you can get the firewall too. I believe zone alarm has a free version that works pretty good.

Try here:

http://www.zonelabs.com/

You may think doing all this is a hassle and a lot of work, but if you get a virus you will wish you had done it. I thought you could only get a virus through an e-mail attachment, I was wrong. These virus writing punks are getting tricky. When I got my virus I got a download pop up asking me if I wanted to download a program, I clicked no. I think they had the no button set to yes, and I am pretty sure that is how I got the virus. When I clicked no it closed the pop up window out but it installed instantly so I never knew it had installed. I believe it used that active x scripting in IE 5.0 to auto-download the viruses.

Then I had 4 trojan viruses and my computer was screwed up big time. Every time I tried to open a folder it would freeze my computer up and I would have to power it off. They only thing I could do was connect to the internet and surf the net. I was lucky, if I could not have got on the internet I might have had to reformat my hard drive and re-install all my software etc. Then about a month later the damn computer took a shit on me and I had to buy a new one. Thanks to some generous people I was able to raise the money to get it. Some of them are members here and a couple were not.

Well that's my virus story, and my computer protection tips. I hope it helps someone, it's a bitch when you get a virus. If anyone has anything to add to my info please do it.

Try that Firefox browser, I will bet you love it, I know I do.

[Zorra]

1. Thanks for the info.