Share Your Computer Virus stories!

[n3tfury]

This is a Ubuntu forum, why is there a virus thread?

The water cooler of UbuntuForums, a place to discuss pretty much anything (within reason)

^^

[3rdalbum]

I've had exactly one virus - or rather, my father had a virus. He put a floppy disk into his Mac and Norton Antivirus scanned it automatically, found the virus and removed it. Boring!

Once I dreamed that my Linux box had a virus, so I decided to run a virus scan on the Linux and Windows partitions. Thankfully, all I got was a false positive from a Dreamweaver behaviour library (ClamAV identified it as a harmless Javascript annoyance).

[distroman]

I once opened a mail with a subseven not very good thinking luckily zonealarm blocked it but it was ages ago. Don’t remember the last time I had a virus maybe that’s just because I am hardly ever surfing in windows.

However not to long ago I removed the following from someone else’s computer.
Class Adware: Vundo Variant, Think-Adz.
Class Trojan: Net-Winload/CP, Net-fake.YTB, Downloader-Gen, Rootkit-TnCore.
I know you’re all thinking porn but it’s not, this is what happens if you hand over copy of windows to kids.

One of those things removed “log off”, “turn off computer” and “run” kind of funny.

[Haruhara]

I didn't have too many problems with XP. About two weeks after I first bought my computer, the darn thing wouldn't boot up properly. I reinstalled the system and lived happily with it for two years. Of course I was very religious in checking out what was on my system and why.

Then my roommate moved in.

She had a laptop, so I let her use my compy for watching movies. Being an avid fan of anime, I had every necessary codec I'd ever encountered. It was around midnight, while I was fast asleep, that she came across a file that insisted "This file cannot be played by your system. Download 3wplayer."

AVG free didn't catch it. The spyware it came with was stupid enough to show up in the windows "Add/Remove programs" thingummy, so that was a quick fix. But the trogan wasn't detected by AVG free, I ended up running Kapersky (or something like) that to find it. The antivirus software couldn't "heal" the virus, so I happily clicked "delete" on all the files it had infected.

My bad. The last file to be deleted was the mouse and keyboard drivers.

I've been running Linux ever since. I comfort myself with the fact that my new roommate isn't capable of using my system, let alone messing it up. Ubuntu has been a fun learning experience with great community support. Thank you, Ubuntu!

[Mr.Auer]

My first virus was on Atari ST..It was called Ghost and spread from floppy to floppy when swapping disks. All it did was switch the direction of mouse movement after a certain time..So when you tried to move the cursor up, it went down, move it down and up it went It had spread to maybe 15 disks before I noticed it. Luckily there was a virus removal tool for ST and it easily removed the virus from all infected disks without doing any harm to the data.

The only other time has been on XP, and that was a worm rather than a virus...The infamous Blaster worm. Both times I got that one was because i FORGOT to unplug the ethernet cable when reinstalling windows . The first time the cable had been plugged in for maybe two minutes when I remembered to quickly yank it out - but too late! msblast.exe was already up to no good.
Second time was similar, forgot the cable connected..Of course it was easy to remove if you were quick enough to either get the fix from net before blaster would shut down the computer, or install AV in that time.

When I was still using XP I took all the precautions I could: using Firefox or Opera, firewall and AV always, and completely removing or disabling unneeded services like printer sharing, Messenger etc. and never got any other virii.

Still, on linux i dont have to worry much. As long as you check out where you get software from and dont compile and install any malware.tar.gz:s

[DrMelon]

I only really ever had one really bad virus: AOL.

[Chessmaster]

Has anyone ever experienced a Linux virus?

[Arkaniad]

Hi, i'm Arkaniad, better known as <insert real name here>, and i have a story to share.

*dramatic note* I was inphected with a virus ( sorry, my keboard cant type some keys, macintosh....)

It happened today, a trojan slipped by Avast! and downloaded a phake program called VirusRemover2008.

This was phollowed by pop ups, blocking oph sites related to removing it, and phinally, total death.

I then dug out thy holy grail ( ubuntu 8.10 cd!) and slid it into thy computer drive!

-end stupid public service announcment-

It was a bad virus. Just watch out iph you use windows

[Kernel Sanders]

I have never had a virus on vista or XP post SP2.

[2hot6ft2]

Naturally it was windows, xp to be specific. The usual, went to the wrong place, clicked on the wrong thing, agreed to let it install without paying attention. Next thing I knew I kept getting redirected in IE, pop ups advertising a system cleaner for guess what...the bloody thing that infected xp.

Reboot into ubuntu, (one more good reason to duel boot IF you insist on running windows) run AVG on the xp partition. Ahah, there they are, hidden in windows.

Scattered around, must have been about a dozen different ones. Since AVG wouldn't delete them but it would show me where they were. I simply browsed to them, still in ubuntu naturally and killed them all. Right click and Permanently Delete no trash can and no coming back.

Re scan with AVG, avast, and clamav until I was sure they were all dead and gone. So ubuntu and linux came to the rescue that day and now you'll be hard pressed to find me with windows running.

And that's why there's a virus thread in a linux forum.