Got hit with a virus today.

[Rich]

I was doing my usual morning surf through various comics, when a screen popped up telling me I might have a virus. I attempted to click off the screen, but it changed to another that purported to be running a scan of my computer. Of course, it was picking up "virus" infections by the boat load.

I got off the net and ran AVG-Free, and it identified it as FakeAlert. It was then contained in the vault, and I continued on my morning routine with no further problems.

I picked it up from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website while attempting to view the comic strip BC. I later went back and verified that as the specific source. There are two other comics I view from the site (Funky Winkerbean and Zits), but they appear to be clean.

The virus hides in the Documents and Settings folder of the computer, so it may take a few minutes to winkle it out.

<edit> I went back the next day, and it was gone. So the PI webtech is on the ball. </edit>

[Mud_Dog]

Damn, I had that one twice and couldn't get rid of it with anything. Of course, It was only the little pop-up deal since I never clicked on it(my browser bar is a different color so I saw it was out of the ordinary).

I HATE those damned things. If I ever find the bastard that made those I'll take a baseball bat to his knee caps, arm bar both his arms and drag him through the sharpest ground I can find, and leave him for the vultures. ****in' ***hole.

[Cybrludite]

Just be glad you only had one computer to clean... I just spent the last three days at work helping to deal with worm_downad.a. We appear to have been the first to report the SOB to Trend, back on Monday morning. They finally got a working update for the scanners to us this evening.

The manual fix for XP is to makes sure you're running Service Pack 2, then apply hotfix KB958644. Next, check under services for a service named with random characters. Looking at its properties will show it to be pointing towards svchost.exe. open up regedit and use the Find function under Edit to search under Data for that random gibberish name. Click on the entry it finds, and delete ONLY the line with that gibberish. Close out that key and it will give you an error about empty lines. Click ok & close regedit. Reboot.

Now repeat that on the hundreds of infected machines that have been sending tons of port 445 traffic, and you'll have some idea of how my day's been. Let's hear it for the various high-speed low-drag monitoring programs which let us find & stop this POS before it did more damage...

And let me just add that I hope the person who wrote this virus knows morse code. If I ever get a hold of them... well, the Metallica fans here are no doubt familiar with the movie "Johnny Got His Gun"...